Typeset for people, legible to machines

An increasing share of this site's readers aren't people. They're agents: models sent to look us up, summarise what we do, and report back to a human who may never visit. Most websites treat that reader as a scraper to be endured, hand it the same tangle of markup as everyone else, and leave it to guess.

We typeset this site for people. Cormorant at display sizes, wide margins, William Morris in the gutters. None of that survives being read by a machine, and none of it needs to.

The manuscript, on request

So every content page here has a twin. Request a page with Accept: text/markdown, the polite way of saying "I'm a machine, skip the wallpaper", and you get clean markdown instead of markup: the same words, from the same source, nothing lost in translation. There's a small read-only API too, and a catalogue at a well-known address that tells an agent where everything is.

Two details we're fond of. The redaction survives translation: client names under NDA wear a strikethrough in the markdown, because discretion doesn't stop applying when the reader is software. And nothing is written for machines separately: the twin is generated from the same source as the page, so the two can never drift apart.

Why bother

Because brands are increasingly described secondhand. When something summarises us to you, we'd rather it quote the manuscript than paraphrase the wallpaper. Making yourself easy to read accurately isn't a growth hack. It's the current form of a very old discipline: say what you do, clearly, and keep it where people, and now machines, can find it.