Colophons, and why I'd never heard the word

Every developer I know has the same itch. Pop the hood on a website, a SaaS app, an app on the App Store, and see how it was built. Which framework. Which hosting. Which type. The craft underneath the surface.

The colophon page is the formal scratch to that itch.

The word comes from publishing. A colophon is the small inscription on the last page of a book that tells you the typeface, the paper, the press, the binding. The book's how. Stripe Press still does this. Information Architects does this. A small corner of the web that takes its lineage from print has been doing it for years.

I had never heard the word until six months ago.

That isn't a humblebrag. Ten-plus years in corporate engineering, up through senior director, and the word "colophon" never came up. The companies I worked at shipped real software to millions of users, and not one of them had a public page that said "here is how we built this." It wasn't anyone's job. It wasn't a category.

I came across it earlier this year, looked it up, read a few examples, and built one that weekend.

Lionshead's colophon is at lionshead.digital/colophon. Stack, type, color source, build method, hosting. One screen, no decoration. The same structure now ships in every Lionshead product per a company rule. They all have colophons.

I added it because building things can be a craft, not just a job. Corporate engineering taught me to ship. Lionshead is teaching me to sign my work.

• #building-lionshead
• #craft
• #process