Notes on Working in Monochrome

I keep returning to monochrome not out of austerity but out of honesty. Colour is a loan against attention: it works, and it accrues interest. A red call-to-action is read first today and ignored tomorrow, once everything has learned to shout.

Remove the hue and the page has to earn its hierarchy. Emphasis comes from weight, from space, from the size of a heading against the text beneath it. These were always the load-bearing elements; colour merely let us avoid getting them right.

There is a second, quieter reason. A monochrome page ages slowly. Palettes date — every era has its tell — but a well-set column of black text on warm paper looks much the same across a century of books. If the writing here is meant to last, the surface should not announce the year it was made.

None of this is a rule for anyone else. It is a constraint I find clarifying, the way a poet finds a form clarifying: the smaller the box, the more deliberate every move inside it has to be.