Image-free policy
Nothing here is a photograph of anything
Every visual on this site is drawn by code — CSS gradients, SVG, canvas or plain type. That is an aesthetic position first and a performance position second, and it is checkable: the audit below scans the source for image tags and reports what it finds, including the zero.
<img> tags in the source
2
across 138 files scanned
Image files in the build
1
the favicon, which is an SVG
Raster assets in the catalog
0
components whose copy mentions a bitmap format
Backgrounds, all procedural
33
CSS 32 · WebGL 2 · SVG 12
What this buys
- No image pipeline, so no variants to generate, no format negotiation, no CDN transform to pay for.
- Everything scales: a gradient at 4× density costs the same bytes as at 1×, and nothing is ever the wrong resolution.
- Every visual is themeable and animatable, because it is code — the 33 backgrounds recolour with the page's tokens.
- Accessibility is easier to hold: decorative layers are real elements with aria-hidden, counted 37 times in the source, rather than an alt-text problem in an editor.
Where the policy has a cost
- A screenshot of a real component is often clearer than a live demo, and this site has no place to put one. The gallery pages are live instead, which is heavier to render and harder to share.
- Social previews are text-only: no Open Graph image is generated, so a shared link is a title and a description. Adding one would mean a build step that rasterises — the first real image the site would ship.
- Product work by real teams usually needs a screenshot in the changelog. The changelog here describes changes in prose, which is honest and less persuasive.
The rule this page is written to: if an image is ever added, it is added as a deliberate exception with its weight accounted for on the budget page — not quietly, as the first of a pipeline.