“Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it.”¹

Here you’ll find a series of third-party and in-house resources that we’ve worked with to build this web presence: fonts, plugins, scripts, links. A work in progress, as they say, even while we elaborate here on the process… We’ve added a few notes, to put it mildly…

We’ve built on the work of many others, and we’ve also explored ideas worth mentioning that we haven’t been able to integrate.

To begin with, we mention Rando Sans, a variable font — that’s how we discovered variable fonts even exist… And then there’s an artist² who reminds me very much of a “lost soul” back than who used to work the streets of Barcelona: Shantell Martin, who created Shantell Sans together with a considerable technical team.

Then there’s the website of Excalifont — the font you’re reading now. In the end, we chose it for longer texts rather than Rando Sans or Shantell Sans. Rando, for example, has some very interesting features, like variations within the same letters that give a stronger sense of true handwriting, but taste matters… and Excalifont won our approval.³

There’s also the fundamental piece: how much it cost us to find and decide on this theme. We looked at hundreds, went back, discarded, reconsidered… The Reverie template by Automattic — which we have ultimately developed much further.

We have created a series of “personal plugins” — reusable and adaptable MU Plugins for Cal Talaia — a perfect solution for adapting third-party plugins and adding functionality to a website. Among them, for now, a small addition that provides greater flexibility and more possibilities when editing with our block theme: the Cal Talaia Gutenberg Enhancement⁴, along with improvements for the Gallery Block and the Carousel Block. We have also developed an adaptation to work better with the Multisite Language Switcher, which had some bugs and limitations.

After researching and analyzing compatibility with Vik Booking, the booking system we are integrating, we had to dismantle the WordPress Multisite and ended up developing a basic, yet sufficient, language router to support multiple languages, including a custom switcher for WordPress standard single instance mode.

Here you’ll find the plugins, ready to be reused and adapted to your needs: Cal Talaia MU-Plugins…

Even our logo uses third-party work — but that would require telling a very long and rather boring story. We all carry our baggage… Better to share something that still excites me today: something that can’t really be used broadly in projects, except occasionally for titles or highlights, but which has real merit — and all the credit goes to my daughter: the GREC font.

It’s also worth mentioning that the madman behind all this has developed a habit of reading and rereading classics — like Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse, or The History of Rome by Theodor Mommsen, the only historian to have received the Nobel Prize in Literature. These readings have convinced me that we need to communicate more, not less — that we need to be present, real, contradictory.

That’s why we document a bit of the making-of.

1. Often attributed to Bertolt Brecht and connected to one of Karl Marx’s deeper theses on Ludwig Feuerbach, which states: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.”
   We won’t make things too easy — you’ll have to look up the translation yourselves — but we go further, connecting this idea with Fluxus, and with one of its notable figures, a kind of reborn spirit, Robert Filliou, who said: “Art is what makes life more interesting than art.”
   Art that does not transform, art that does not allow itself to be used, that is not open to discourse and reuse, is a closed form of art — and a rather unproductive one. ↩︎
2. He signed his works as Nero di China, and filling every blank surface he encountered with his 0.2 mm Rotring pen became a constant obsession.
   
   
   
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3. When selecting a typeface, factors such as visual density, stroke variation, formal consistency, spacing, reading speed, and visual fatigue must also be considered — and Excalifont comes very close to neutral fonts. ↩︎
4. For instance, we needed to embed a text chunk using a different font — GREC — but it was not available in the Gutenberg editor toolbar. Gutenberg also does not support embedding images within Rich Text blocks; adding an image inside a footnote was not possible, as it required inserting a separate block, thus breaking the footnote structure. ↩︎