writingfiled 11 August 2026
Maggie Appleton
Essays with hand-drawn diagrams, planted and tended in public.
maggieappleton.com
What to steal
- 01Notes carry a growth stage — seedling, budding, evergreen — instead of a publish date. It gives you permission to publish before it's finished.
- 02Her own illustrations *are* the brand. No stock, no gradients, and the site is instantly identifiable at thumbnail size.
- 03The index shows type and maturity, not chronology, so old good pieces don't sink.
- 04Warm paper, dark warm ink, one cool accent. The teal only appears on links and it's enough.
Notes
The clearest example of a personal site as a garden rather than a feed. It made me stop treating the wiki as an archive of finished things.
The illustrations are the moat and also the honest lesson: the distinctive part of a personal site is the part you draw by hand, not the part you can install.
Palette
Pulled from the site's own stylesheets. Tap a swatch to copy it.
Type
- display
- Canela Deck
- body
- Canela Text
- mono
- IBM Plex Mono
Filed under
pull5 out of 5