I started Brain Drip as a way to keep my notes about AI in one place. The earlier design — warm cream paper, rounded card grids, friendly serif headlines — was fine. It looked like every other AI-flavored explainer site you can think of. That was the problem. It looked like every other AI-flavored explainer site you can think of.

When I sat down to write a long post, the design quietly told me not to. The cards wanted to be cards. The grids wanted to be browsed. There was nowhere on the page that felt like a single voice talking at you for four thousand words. So I never started.

This is a note about why I'm redesigning the site, what I'm changing, and what I want from this version that I didn't ask for from the last one.

The thing I actually want

The honest goal: I want Brain Drip to feel like a publication you read, not a catalog you flip through. Specifically I want three things from the reading experience:

  1. It should look like prose, not product copy. Real text, set in a real serif, on a real page. Not 16px Inter on a card with a gradient border.
  2. Long reads should be calm. I shouldn't have to fight a sticky banner, three sidebars, and a chat bubble to finish a paragraph.
  3. The author should be visible without being loud. A byline, a date, a publication mark. That's it. The text does the rest of the work.

The previous design optimized for the wrong thing: it made the catalog easy. But once you're inside a piece, ease is not the goal. Stillness is.

What changed

I rebuilt around an editorial atlas frame. The whole site reads more like a magazine and less like a SaaS dashboard:

  • Source Serif 4 for body text, Inter Tight for the chrome, JetBrains Mono for numbers and code. Source Serif gets out of the way; Fraunces, which is what I used before, never quite did.
  • A cool off-white paper instead of warm cream. The palette is mostly deep teal ink with one electric coral accent that does almost all the punctuation work — italics, dots, paper-link tags, drop caps in the references, the brand mark stripe.
  • Tufte-style three-column reading layout: left rail for the table of contents, a 640px reading column in the middle, a right gutter for margin notes. On smaller screens the rails fold away and the article keeps its proportions.
  • Drop caps on the first paragraph of every concept and post. Mono section numbers (01, 02) sitting above the section titles, generated automatically by a CSS counter.
  • Pull quotes with a thin coral rule on the left, not a giant grey block.
  • Code blocks in deep navy with a small uppercase language tag in the corner — they should look like code, not like every other component on the page.

The cards wanted to be cards. The grids wanted to be browsed.

The catalog pages are now mostly index tables: thin top borders, mono numerals in the gutter, hover backgrounds. They feel like the table of contents of a printed volume rather than a grid of equal-sized blobs. That's deliberate. A grid says pick one and graze; a table says here is the order.

The pillars

There are now four pillars, and they each have a job:

  • Field Notes — this. Writing by me. Long where it needs to be; short where it doesn't. First-person, opinionated, not always finished.
  • Research — interactive explainers for papers and ideas. Hover, click, drag. Each one is a little reading machine.
  • Blueprints — step-by-step builds. How to ship an MCP, build a RAG pipeline, set up a code-review bot.
  • Courses — the structured stuff. A path through a topic, broken into modules and concept-sized readings.

The split matters because the reading mode is different in each. A Field Note is a single voice. A Research drip is a toy you can play with. A Blueprint is a recipe. A Course is a syllabus. The same chrome would dilute all four.

What I'm skeptical of

A few things I'm explicitly not doing:

  • No social previews of each post on every page. Tempting, never useful.
  • No newsletter signup popover. If you want to subscribe you can find the link.
  • No "estimated read time" psychology unless I think it earns its keep. The number is in the byline because it's genuinely useful for triage, not because growth-team blog templates demand it.
  • No "related posts" auto-recommender at the bottom. When I want you to read something next, I'll tell you. Otherwise the page ends.

I'd rather have a site with five great essays and nothing else than a site with fifty mediocre essays and a recommender pretending they're related.

The real reason

The truthful version of this post is shorter than the rest of the page combined: I want to write here, and I wasn't going to write on the old design.

Design isn't decoration; it's permission. The right design tells you what the place is for. The previous Brain Drip was a place to look up concepts. This Brain Drip is a place to read them, and — increasingly — a place I'll write them out in public.

If you're reading this, that part is now working.