The colophon
A colophon is the page at the back of a book where the printer admits how the thing was made. Most websites skip it. This one keeps it, because the choices are half the project.
Paper Arcade borrows its look from job printers, riso studios, and newspaper front pages: one paper color, two inks, thick rules, and type that is allowed to be loud. It exists to prove a point that a game site does not need a dark background and a neon glow to feel alive. Everything here is hand-written HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. No frameworks, no bundler, no build step. What you play is what was typed.
Every color, gap, and duration on the site comes from a token at
the top of the stylesheet, which means changing one line changes
every page. Paper is #f3eee3. Ink is
#191510. The two accents are riso orange
#e8511c and press green #2b6e62, with a
mustard #d9a514 for stamps. Borders are two pixels and
shadows are hard offsets, because soft blur belongs in a
photography app. Ink mode swaps paper and ink for anyone who plays
at night, and the swap is one attribute change, not a second
stylesheet.
Two faces, as the rule allows: Fraunces for headlines, with its optical size doing the heavy lifting at 900 weight, and Space Mono for everything the machine says, which is most things. Space Mono was chosen because a monospaced voice makes the games read like forms and tickets rather than marketing. Body text is at least 16 pixels everywhere, line lengths are capped, and headlines use real optical kerning from the font file rather than squishing.
The house rule on motion: small things move fast, big things move once. Micro-interactions run 100 to 300 milliseconds on transforms and opacity only, entrances stagger in as you scroll, the hero headline gets exactly one kinetic moment, and page changes use the browser's own view transitions where supported. Nothing loops forever except the ticker, which earns it. If your system asks for reduced motion, the whole press room stills: reveals snap in, the ticker freezes, and only the game boards keep moving, because a board that does not respond to input is broken, not calm.
There is no backend, no analytics script, no cookie banner, and no account. Scores live in your browser's local storage under a shared prefix so the record desk can find them, and the wipe button on the stats page removes all of it in one go. The site would work identically served from a floppy disk.
Concept, design, code, and all words: the Paper Arcade shop floor. Type: Fraunces and Space Mono from Google Fonts. Hosting: Cloudflare Pages. Source: github.com/stewiefeh/paper-arcade. Errors in the dictionary are the compositor's own.