The lightbox and the reading room.
The idea behind the new Line Monkey MD: the writing sits on bright film-white paper, like images on a lightbox. Every essay gets its own annotated plate, and the dark theme is the reading room radiologists actually work in. Everything below is the system the WordPress build will follow.
Wordmark (temporary)
The final logo comes in Milestone 3
Set in the new type, nothing more
“Line Monkey” is set in Literata, the reading face. “MD” sits in a small boxed credential in the label face, the way a credential follows a name. The catheter with its J-tip is the one graphic signature, and it already runs through the site as the scroll line and the section map.
This stays in place while the site is built. In Milestone 3 the final mark is drawn from the real pages, with a favicon, social images and a newsletter header.
Color
Paper, film ink and one red
Topics
Hub colors from introducer sheaths, 4 to 8 Fr
Today 61 of the 77 essays are “Uncategorized.” The new site files every essay under one of five topics. Each topic takes the hub color of an introducer sheath, so the color system comes from the procedure room rather than a stock palette. Every essay has already been sorted. You can move any of them.
Series run across topics
Technical Tuesdays (7), Financial Fridays (3), From the Meetings (4) and Guest Essays (2) become series with their own pages and “next in series” links.
Tags get cleaned up
The 62 tags include duplicates like #obl and obl. They will be merged into a short list used for search, and old tag links will redirect.
Typography
Three faces, each with one job
Literata
Designed for long reading on screens. One family covers body text and big headlines, so the site reads as one voice.
Archivo
A condensed grotesk for topics, navigation and buttons. Its narrow width echoes printed labels on medical devices.
IBM Plex Mono
Only for plate annotations, dates in the archive and small data. It is the voice of the image, not the writer.
46 to 112 pxIndependent IR lives here.
38 to 68 pxWhy I Quit My $300,000 Job
25 to 31 pxThe work and the value have come apart
19 px · 1.68 line height · 68 characters
The office-based setting remains the only site where true independence is feasible, where IRs can achieve market rates through Medicare Physician Fee Schedule payments without ceding decision-making power or financial control.
12 px · trackedPractice & Ownership · 24 min read
Components
The parts every page is built from
“Employment turns physicians from value creators into cost centers.”
From the essayShort definitions and related essays sit beside the line they belong to. On a phone they open with a tap.
Reading room
The dark theme
Dark like a reading room, not just inverted
Readers on a night shift or a phone get a dark theme that follows their device setting, or a button switches it. In the dark, plates turn into negatives: bright vessels on black, the way you would window an angiogram. Try the Reading room button at the top of this page.