Two changes landed on the homepage this week, both aimed at the same thing: making the first few seconds actually show what this is, instead of describing it.
The hero is video now. A short, silent, looping clip of the prototype (crank, cartridge, color bars) plays behind the title the moment the page loads, self-hosted rather than embedded from anywhere, with a lighter mobile-specific cut served under 768px so it doesn’t drag a desktop-sized file onto a phone connection. If your system has motion reduction turned on, you get the same shot as a still frame instead: no forced autoplay.
The titles are set in a font we built from scratch. Not a licensed typeface: the actual 1967 Hershey vector-plotter data (public domain, from the original US Naval Weapons Laboratory work), decoded stroke-by-stroke and rebuilt as a real webfont, with a pass added on top that simulates an actual pen dragged over paper: strokes subdivided into short segments, each one nudged slightly in position and width, with a small round touchdown mark at the start of every stroke. It reads as hand-set because it effectively is: just simulated rather than drawn by hand for each letter.
Both are small pieces, but they’re the kind of thing that changes how the whole site feels before anyone reads a word of copy.