A redesign for the site itself

fairyfox.io gets a full-bleed, dark-first layout tuned to WCAG AA, real project icons, a fuller documentation library, and a complete favicon set.

The round-ups here usually report what changed in the projects fairyfox.io tracks. This one turns the same lens on the site itself: it shipped a redesign today, in several passes, and the work is worth recording on the same terms.

Layout and theme

The previous design stacked everything into a single narrow column. The rebuilt assets/css/main.css replaces that with a full-width fluid container and full-bleed section bands, alternating tints to separate them, and a sticky footer so short pages still anchor it to the bottom. A second pass made the theme dark by default, with the light theme following the operating system (prefers-color-scheme); colour now lives in per-project accents and the brand mark rather than a bright site-wide gradient.

Contrast was treated as a requirement, not an afterthought. Every text and background pair was computed against WCAG 2.1 AA and meets it — an --accent-ink token carries an AA-safe violet for text, and the primary gradient was ended at a point where white text on it still passes. The theme also adds :focus-visible outlines and a prefers-reduced-motion guard.

The header’s Projects menu is now a plain list of project names, each linking straight to that project’s on-site /docs/<key>/ page, and the section formerly called Blog is now Updates throughout the nav, footer, post layout, and index. The home page lost its oversized hero in favour of a compact masthead followed by full-width Projects and Latest-updates sections and a documentation grid. Each project now shows its real application icon, keyed to its own accent, in place of the old first-letter glyph.

A fuller documentation library

The /docs/ library was expanded to surface the whole notes/ tree under a new “This site” category — architecture, the system map, deployment, the updates workflow, design decisions, and principles — separated from the shared cross-project standards, and all rewritten in the site’s neutral voice. The About page was rewritten as a structured page rather than a single column.

Favicons

Finally, the lone SVG favicon was replaced with a complete cross-platform set: favicon.ico, an SVG, a 96×96 PNG, a 180×180 Apple touch icon, 192/512 web-app manifest icons, and a site.webmanifest, all declared in the document head.

The redesign milestone landed as version 0.3.0, with the interior-page and favicon follow-ups taking it to 0.3.1.


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