A journal that redrew itself every equinox.
PLINTH is a literary journal that only ever existed on the web. The Unwin-Dunraven Literary Ecclesia published it and I was a member. Garett Strickland edited and Tyann Prentice made the graphics. I did the design and typography, and I built every page. The house line was that PLINTH attains each equinox, so we shipped twice a year. There was never a print edition.
One rule kept it from becoming a template job. No issue could look like the last one. Nine pieces and Tyann's images would come in, and I designed the issue around them from scratch. A print journal changes its cover and keeps its body. We changed everything, from the grid and the type to the way you moved through it.
Those seven issues carried work by Brian Evenson, Blake Butler, Johannes Göransson, Eugene Thacker, Janice Lee, Will Alexander, Aimee Parkison, Sarah Fox, Peter O'Leary, Vi Khi Nao, and Kit Schluter's translation of Marcel Schwob. That came to sixty-three pieces, nine to an issue.
Seven issues, seven typographic systems.
Type did most of the work. Each issue got a stack picked for the writing it had to hold, self-hosted as webfonts, set against a grid built for that issue alone. Issue 02 ran Lato against Museo Slab under a photograph of steel. Issue 04 went to Bebas Neue condensed capitals on a mint hairline grid. Issue 06 took the caption cut of Utopia Std, the optical size drawn for small text, and set it at wordmark size.
Issue 03 skipped web type on its contents page and set the whole thing as a broadside image. All seven are still live at plinth.us, so open a few.
The contents page was the cover.
With no spine and no cover to print, the contents page had to announce the issue and be the only way into it. That's where each issue got the most attention.
Issue 01 hung titles and bylines off thin bracket rules, staggered down the page so you had to travel to read them. Issue 03 gave up on HTML text and set its contents as one broadside image, then wired it for navigation with an image map. Polygon hotspots traced around the letterforms, so a display letter three hundred pixels tall was the link to the poem. Issue 06 dropped the page-per-piece model and put the whole issue on one long scrolling black page, with the contents columns anchored into the text.
Issue 07 went back to issue 01's bracket rules and closed the run where it started.
Reading rooms.
The reading pages had the opposite job. Each piece got its own page at a comfortable measure, with no sidebar and nothing else competing with the writing. The issue's identity lived in the type and the page furniture and otherwise kept out of the way.
That left room for the pieces that needed something specific. Prose got a justified measure and a lot of margin. Poetry got whatever the poem was already doing. Tipu Attar's Lines is scored across the full width of the page, so I built the page to hold words where the poem put them rather than reflowing them into a column. Issue 03's reading pages run a custom scrollbar, a black track with a white thumb, because I wanted a rule down the side where the browser wanted chrome.
All of it was hand-written HTML and CSS on a small fractional column grid I carried between issues and re-proportioned each time. I reused the structure and rebuilt everything you could see. With no CMS and no build step, every issue still resolves at its original address a decade later.
