01 — Design System
This site runs on a theme called "Kuélap Night" — every color, typeface, and shape below is a deliberate nod to a real place in Peru, not a random palette.
"Kuélap Night" is a synthesis of two references: the rhomboid stone friezes of the Kuélap fortress, built by the Chachapoyas — the “cloud people” of Peru’s northern highlands — and the cold, star-lit silhouette of Huascarán, the tallest peak in the Cordillera Blanca. One gave the site its warm accent and its geometry; the other gave it its dark, high-altitude base.
A cold, near-black base — the night sky above a 6,000-meter ridge — holds a warm snow-cream text color and a terracotta-and-ochre accent lifted straight from Chachapoyas textile weaving.
Fraunces carries the display weight with a literary, carved feel; Hanken Grotesk keeps body text calm and legible; IBM Plex Mono marks every label, eyebrow, and fact — the site's equivalent of a surveyor's notation.
The rhomboid — repeated as the Frieze divider, the card's corner marker, and a barely-there page texture — is a direct nod to the diamond stonework facing the walls of Kuélap. The angular ridgeline behind the homepage's opening section is the same idea applied to a skyline: Huascarán's silhouette, simplified to a few straight lines.
02 — Regional Tour
A short, non-exhaustive introduction to the two regions above — worth a visit long before they're worth a color palette.
Land of the Cloud People
High in the cloud forest of Amazonas, the Chachapoyas built Kuélap — a walled citadel with a larger perimeter than Machu Picchu's, wrapped in the rhomboid stone friezes that shaped this site's signature motif. The region is still one of Peru's least-visited: cloud forest, cliffside sarcophagi, and one of the tallest waterfalls in the world at Gocta.
Cordillera Blanca
Huascarán is Peru's highest mountain and the centerpiece of a national park protecting the world's highest tropical mountain range. Its snow line against a dark sky is where this site's cold base and warm-white text come from. Huaraz, a few hours from Lima, is the usual gateway for trekking the range.
That's the wall of Kuélap and the ridgeline of Huascarán — now sitting quietly behind every page of this site.