Unlike many tech blogs, which pursue aesthetic at the cost of readability, I have prioritised brutal, minimal typography, to a degree that some may find off-putting.
Design Choices
This site uses high-contrast, WCAG-compliant colours for body text. While I have added a relatively subtle dark theme, the light theme uses the default of black-on-white text, for maximum contrast.
The text is justified, and uses the Computer Modern fonts, in an aesthetic choice to mimic the default appearance of LaTeX documents. I strongly considered using Times, since it is a built-in font on most desktop browsers, but on Android, which does not have it, browsers would fall back to the hideously ugly system-default serif font.
Styling is generally kept minimal, except where it conveys useful information. For example, the navigation bar is given a drop shadow, since it “floats” above the document, staying in view as you scroll down a longer page.
Emoji are used as icons in the navigation bar, rather than images, because they can be directly embedded within the HTML file. They do not require separate HTTP requests to load, and are easier to render in text/terminal-based browsers like w3m and lynx.
Inspiration
In addition to their ideas about long-term website maintenance and improvement, I drew on Gwern.net as a source of inspiration (and CSS) for the aesthetics of this website.
I have dipped into Practical Typography by Matthew Butterick in the past few years, but have yet to read to read it in depth. The advice is good, and I like that they have clearly applied it to the site itself.