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

Here you will find a series of third-party and in-house resources that we have worked with to create this web presence: fonts, plugins, scripts, links. A work in progress, as they say — even as we write these silly notes about the process… yes, we have added a few notes, to put it euphemistically...

We have made use of a lot of other people's work and have also researched things worth mentioning that we were unable to integrate.

To start, we mention Rando Sans, a variable font — we learned that variable fonts exist thanks to this... and we continue with an artist who reminds me very much of a "lost soul" who used to work on the streets of Barcelona; we are talking about an artist who works with a marker, Shantell Martin, who created the font Shantell Sans, with a considerable technical team...

Then there is the website for Excalifont, the font you are enjoying as you read this. In the end we went with this one for long texts rather than Rando Sans or Shantell Sans — Rando, in particular, has some very interesting features such as variations for the same letters that give a more genuine handwritten feel, but taste matters, and Excalifont got the green light...²

Also the basic resource: how hard it was to find and decide to use this theme — we looked at hundreds, went back, discarded, rethought... the Reverie template by Automattic... in the end we developed it much further.

We have created a series of "personal plugins" — reusable and adaptable MU Plugins, a perfect option for adapting third-party plugins and adding functionality to a website. Highlights so far include a small addition that provides more possibilities and versatility for editing with our block theme, the Cal Talaia Gutenberg Enhancement, as well as improvements for the Gallery Block and the Carousel Block.

Finally, we have made a titanic effort to offer a complete plugin for routing, translating, and creating content in multiple languages. It is called Lingua Forge and has its own website: https://lingua-forge.com. The repository can be found on Github.

Here you will find the rest of the plugins, which you can reuse and adapt to your liking: Cal Talaia MU-Plugins…

Even our logo makes use of third-party work, but we would have to tell a very long and rather boring story — we all carry our baggage... it is better to share a piece of work that still excites us to this day. It cannot truly be used in projects beyond occasional use, for titles, highlights, but it has merit, and all the merit belongs to my daughter: the font GREC...

It should also be added that the madman behind all this has developed a passion for reading and rereading classics, such as Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse or the History of Rome by the only historian ever to have won the Nobel Prize in Literature, the historian Theodor Mommsen — readings that have convinced me that we need to communicate more, not less... that we need to be present, real, contradictory! That is why we are documenting a little of the making-of.

1. Attributed to Berthold Brecht and related to Marx's deepest thesis on Feuerbach which states "Die Philosophen haben die Welt nur verschieden interpretiert; es kommt darauf an, sie zu verändern." We don't make things easy, you have to search for translation, but furthermore we expand, we connect with Fluxus, an art movement and with one of its prominent exponents, a renaissance man, Robert Filliou, who says that "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, to reuse, is closed art, little productive. ↩︎
2. For the choice of a font, it is necessary to consider, in addition, criteria such as visual density, variation in strokes, consistency of forms, spacing, reading speed and visual fatigue, and Excalifont is very close to "neutral" fonts. ↩︎