The Yarnian telos
The Local Yarn is basically my garden: a garden of thinking and code. It’s tailored to my needs as a guy who likes thinking and writing but isn’t an expert on anything, who misses enchantment, and who likes things to look nice. It’s a place to experiment and solve problems and be creative on several levels at once. (You’re looking at one of the lower levels right now.)
Whatever gets done here, the idea is to:
- invite and reward exploration; entice the visitor to go further up and further in
- make lush, prolific and expert use of language and typography, even obscure or gratuitous variants, purely for their own sake
Yarnian cræft
New areas are always being designed and added. I try to do some cyclical planning, but most of it comes from iterative, deeply lazy, center-building iteration. The current set of “centers” is discussed in Creative Processes.
Like a garden, The Local Yarn has a particular layout, which is described at all levels of detail in Design and Layout.
Finally, it is groomed like a garden. All the lofty notions above—creative processes, design principles—are, in the end, underpinned by a stable of imperfect old tools and machines. Anyone who works on the garden must learn and practice their use, understand how to maintain them, and (eventually) when to replace them. Details of this maintenance are discussed in Tools and Methods.