Colophon · The back-of-book
How Sanity Check is made.
The type, the palette, the illustration discipline, and the decisions behind Volume II. A magazine should tell you who set it — this is that page.
Typography
The display face is Source Serif 4 by Frank Grießhammer (Adobe, OFL), with italic substituting Playfair Display in the wordmark and section heads — the editorial italic carries the personality the SC mark needs. The body face is Inter by Rasmus Andersson, set at 18 px on a 1.65 line-height for long-form readability. Mono labels (eyebrows, dates, byline, CTA chrome) run in JetBrains Mono. Three families, one role each.
Palette
Volume II runs on a deeper register. Deep navy chrome at 60%, warm oat cream tile fill at 30% (the temperature break against the navy field), and a pair of accents at 10%: gold for the primary subscribe CTA + sun-ray glyph, coral for the wordmark italic "Check" + secondary CTAs, hover beats, and section rules. Bay-blue still earns its keep as the divider stripe between sections. Accents are reserved — an accent that appears on too many surfaces stops being an accent.
Illustration
Every essay carries a doodle from the founder's archive — thick-stroke marker on a lavender field, with a single yellow accent per scene and an occasional terracotta hairline. The subjects are objects of the work (kitchens, server racks, open books, dashboards, doors) and never characters. The lone exception is the Grok newspaper-reader hero, the only figural illustration the brand sanctions, kept because it captures the practitioner posture exactly.
Each placement — homepage hero, tile grid, in-article hero — uses the same DoodleFrame recipe: 16:9, contain (never cover), warm-tinted lavender field, terracotta inset hairline. One frame, three sizes. The discipline is what makes the doodles read as a series and not a stock-asset assemblage.
Texture
A 36 px engineered grid sits behind every page at ~5% opacity, warm-cream lines on deep navy. Reads as the under-grid of a practitioner's notebook, the kind you only notice in peripheral vision but that signals "this is a built system" the way Hex.tech and a hundred other engineering blogs do. Above the chrome a thin marquee strip carries founder-voiced announcements; below the wordmark a monospace status line mirrors the kind of feed metadata Hex puts above its blog.
Issue cadence
Volume I ran from 2021 to 2023 and produced twenty-six
essays under the SC NNN and SC EN
numbering. Volume II opened in April 2026 and ships
one essay per Sunday. Issue numbers carry across volumes —
an SC 030 will follow SC 021 even though it lives in a new
volume — because the body of work is continuous even when
the posture isn't.
Stack
Built with Astro 6 (static site generation) and
Tailwind 4. Deployed to Cloudflare Pages, fronted by a
Cloudflare-managed zone. Every essay is also served as
canonical markdown at
/issues/<slug>.md for AI tools that prefer
structured text to parsed HTML — the GEO affordance the
agentic-era reader actually wants. The source is open at
github.com/RayDataCo/rdco-sc.
The byline guard, scripts/check-authors.mjs, runs
as a prebuild step and fails the build if any essay attributes
to anyone other than Ben Wilson. (Once, an import script pulled
the wrong byline. Once was enough.)
Subscription preferences
Sanity Check ships from a single Resend audience — one list, one cadence, one unsubscribe link at the bottom of every issue. There is no preference center to drown in; if you want out, the link in any issue removes you in one click.
Need to update your address? Reply to any issue from the new address and I’ll move you over by hand. The list is small enough that this is faster than a self-serve flow, and I’d rather you have a person on the other end than a form.
Set in Source Serif 4, Inter, JetBrains Mono. Doodles by the editor's hand. Last typeset: April 2026.