Marcel Winatschek

Cold Type

I finished a WordPress theme called Textback sometime this January. The name says what it’s about: text, brought back to the foreground. No clutter, no feature creep—just type against light. The kind of design that makes sense when it’s dark at four in the afternoon and you want something clean rather than aggressive.

Winter pushes me toward minimalism. Not the performed kind where you want credit for how little you’ve used—more the instinctive reduction that happens when you’re cold and tired and you need things to work clearly. Textback came out of that. A lot of white. Navigation that required actual thought to get right, which is usually a sign the design is doing something structural rather than decorative.

Typography is the whole point. Get that right and the rest is almost secondary. I spent more time on spacing and line-height than anything else. That’s how it should be.