Guide · Site 08 of 25

PLI — how it was folded.

PLI is a fictional paper engineering studio in Lyon — pop-up books, self-folding packaging, window theatres. The audience is publishers and premium brands who commission paper mechanisms; the page's single job is to make you feel the moment a flat sheet stands up. So the site itself folds: nothing on it fades in — everything hinges, rises, or unfolds.

i.Palette

Five colours, all argued for by the bench: two paper stocks, the kraft of the backing board, the blue-grey a scalpel shadow makes on white stock, and one spool of bookbinder's thread. The red is spent almost nowhere — the thread, the letter I, punctuation — which is why it reads.

Paper
#FBF8F3
The page. Warm white, 170 gsm.
Cream
#F0EAE0
Second stock — panels, footer, card art.
Kraft
#C9A87C
The back of every panel. Darkened to #856539 wherever it becomes small text.
Shadow blue-grey
#39465C
Ink and every shadow — no black anywhere.
Thread red
#D63426
The stitch. Darkened to #B3261A for small text to hold 4.5:1.

ii.Type

Libre Caslon Text

Display. Caslon is the bookmaker's face — right for a studio that makes books. Used at two extremes only: enormous (the letter-panels, the italic manifesto) and small (numerals, the cover stamp). The middle sizes are deliberately left to the sans.

Work Sans

Body and labels. A quiet, slightly warm grotesque that stays out of the serif's way. Letterspaced caps at 12px carry all wayfinding: eyebrows, tags, specs — the workshop's pencil annotations.

The scale is deliberate, not arithmetic: 12 / 15 / 17 / 22 / ~34 / ~57, then a jump to letter-panels sized in viewport units (clamp(88px, 24vw, 236px) per panel). The typographic bravery moment: the manifesto sets "lying down." on a literal CSS fold — rotateX(-24deg) with a gradient crease — that straightens when you hover it.

iii.Techniques

iv.Iteration log

Pass 1 — Craft

Pass 2 — Depth

Pass 3 — Hardening