Meaning Layer studies design through meaning: original research and writing on meaning-making and designing for meaning, read through psychology, mythology, theology, and the history of the craft. It takes the form of a library, a classroom, and a publication, and it stays with the texts: every connection it draws can be followed back to the passage that occasioned it.
I research and write it, and I design and build it.
The argument
Design began as a way of making meaning visible. A made thing carries an image, and the image reaches further back than the brief that produced it. The depth psychologists took this seriously: symbol, archetype, and the collective unconscious were working materials to them. Design once took it seriously too. This project returns design to its depths.
Three commitments
Text is addressable. Every passage has a permanent identifier and a human reference. You can point at it, cite it, link to it, and come back to it in a year.
Annotation is separate. Commentary, connections, questions and patterns an AI model has found are stored beside the text, anchored to spans, never mixed into it. That is what makes a connection auditable rather than an assertion.
One source, every surface. The same document renders to the screen, the headphone and the printed page. That is why this is a library and not a website, and why the typography is treated as an engineering concern.
The library
The library holds public-domain readings and pictures, each with its credit and rights record: 97 editions, 5,025 passages, and 13,115 pictures.
Shapes is a wing of 113 curves, fractals, polyhedra, and surfaces. Your browser computes each one from its equations while you watch, and each record links the art and buildings that use the shape.
The classroom
Courses are taught from the library. Each course is a term of readings with its schedule, syllabus, and work. The texts open in the same reader the library uses, and the students’ annotations are the coursework. Two courses run there now, including ART 220 Digital Illustration at Charleston Southern University.
The design system
A book page delivered by a visibly modern machine. The text is set in a classical book grammar and left alone. Everything around it is modernist: rules, an exposed grid, letterspaced capitals, flat blocks of a second color. Freight sets the text, Stratos runs every control, and Maison Neue Mono carries every label, folio, and reference. One blue marks anything a model made, and nothing else, so a reader can tell at a glance which claims came from a person.
