Near-Zero Images Is a Feature
Alflora Research · 01 Aug 2026
Tl;dr
- Every image on a page is weight, a request, and a potential dependency on someone else's uptime.
- Externally hosted assets started returning 401s and froze a deploy UI — an outage we didn't cause and couldn't fix.
- The policy is now near-zero images: decoration comes from CSS, SVG, and typography.
- The result loads before you finish blinking, with zero external assets left to rot.
The incident
The Pages app — the thing that deploys user sites on this network — had a pretty overlay: an externally hosted video, an externally hosted image, both sitting on someone else's CDN. One day the CDN links started returning 401. The overlay's JavaScript waited on media that would never arrive, and the whole deploy interface froze behind a loading screen. Our code, our server, our users — and the outage belonged to a company we've never spoken to, on a platform we don't control, with a fix that amounted to "wait for someone else".
That is the actual cost of external assets. Not bandwidth. Not aesthetics. The cost is that a stranger's cache policy becomes a single point of failure in your critical path, and you only find out when it fails.
The measurement
Once you look at images as liabilities instead of decoration, the arithmetic gets uncomfortable. Each one is bytes on the wire, a connection, a render block, a layout shift. Each externally hosted one is also a DNS lookup to a domain you don't own, a TLS handshake with a server you don't run, and an expiration date you can't see. The average web page ships megabytes of imagery to communicate what a well-set headline and a border could communicate in kilobytes.
So the question stopped being "what image goes here" and became "what is this image actually doing that CSS can't". The honest answer, almost every time: nothing.
The system
This site — and its sibling, the portfolio — run on a simple kit: three-to-four-pixel black borders, hard offset shadows with no blur, three bauhaus primaries on paper and ink, and type big enough to trip over. Covers are drawn with repeating-linear-gradient graph paper. Accents are circles, triangles, and bars made of pure CSS. Texture, where it exists, is SVG turbulence. The entire visual identity of two websites contains zero image files, and the stylesheet is the brand guideline.
Constraints are the style. When the palette is three colors and every shape is a circle, a triangle, or a bar, the grid does the design work and nothing needs to be delightful. Delightful is what broke at 3am. The grid stayed up.
What restraint buys
The pages load before you finish blinking. There is no asset pipeline, no image optimization step, no CDN bill, no 401 from a stranger. A redesign means editing a stylesheet, not re-exporting forty assets. And when the self-hosting doctrine says "an external dependency is an outage you haven't scheduled yet", the design layer can honestly answer: scheduled none.
Near-zero images reads as a limitation until you measure it. Then it reads as what it is: a feature with a loading time.