Design contracts for personal sites

A personal website changes in small, irregular bursts. That is exactly why the design rules need to be written down.

Without a contract, every update becomes an opportunity to re-decide typography, spacing, color, cards, and voice. The site slowly turns into a collection of unrelated experiments.

A good design contract is not a full component manual. It is a compact set of decisions: what the site is for, what it should feel like, what tokens it uses, and what patterns are off-limits.

For this site, the contract is simple: warm paper, editorial type, real artifacts, text-first writing, and no portfolio theater.