the machine room doesn't fit in a pocket — open alflora research on a real computer.
borders, geometry, and the discipline of zero images
Three-to-four-pixel black borders. Hard offset shadows, no blur. Letter-spaced display type big enough to trip over. Bauhaus primaries — red #E3002B, blue #0066DB, yellow #FFD900 — on paper and ink.
Finding: constraints are the style. When the palette is three colors and every shape is a circle, triangle, or bar, the grid does the design work and nothing needs to be "delightful".
Every image is weight, a request, and — if someone else hosts it — an outage you haven't scheduled yet. The Cloudinary incident proved the last part in production. So decoration comes from CSS and SVG: shapes, noise, typography.
Finding: "no images" reads as a limitation until you measure it. Then it reads as a page that loads before you finish blinking, with zero external dependencies to 401 on you.
The index is the whole argument: editorial serif headlines, graph-paper covers drawn in pure CSS, hard shadows, three colors. Loud without being busy — and not a single image file.
Finding: maximalism is not the opposite of restraint. A few big moves on a strict grid beat thirty small ones.
portfolio.alflora.app is the other experiment: same borders, same shadows, different palette. Two sites, one design language, zero shared images.
Finding: a design system is proven when it survives a second surface. This site is the second surface.
Every image is weight, a request, and — if someone else hosts it — an outage you haven't scheduled yet. The Cloudinary incident proved it in production, so decoration now comes from CSS and type.