the fonts were never loaded

I decided my site’s design was tired. The design was fine. The font wasn’t there.

The theme asked for two webfonts from a stylesheet WordPress was never told to serve, so the request never happened, and nothing errored, because nothing was ever asked for. Every page rendered in the system font. On Windows that’s Segoe UI — a decent interface font, and a strange thing to build an identity on by accident.

Here’s the part that stung. The theme tightens letter-spacing to minus three hundredths of an em on every heading. It sizes type with clamp() at every breakpoint. Somebody tuned all of that, carefully and repeatedly, against a typeface that wasn’t on the page. That somebody was me.

Four lines fixed it. Enqueue the stylesheet properly, preconnect two hosts, delete the import that was doing nothing.

Then I kept reading, because I wanted to know what else was in there. Not the palette — dark walnut was never the problem. The decoration was. A grid overlay across the whole viewport. Clipped corners on every card and panel. Glow dots. Three stacked radial gradients. Blur on everything that held still. I didn’t design any of it, I inherited it, and I left it there. That’s what made the site read like a template, because it was one.

What replaced it is smaller than it sounds. One focus ring, visible on everything you can tab to. Motion that stays hidden behind a class only JavaScript adds, so the page still reads with the script blocked. Reduced-motion respected everywhere it animates. A muted gray lightened until it clears contrast at the size it’s actually used at. Metadata in the head, so a shared link stops rendering as a gray rectangle. And the templates that never existed: a 404, a search page, a single post.

None of that is a redesign. The site is the same dark walnut it was this morning. It just loads the typeface it was built for, and I’ve now written a whole post about a mistake only I could see, which is either honesty or a very specific kind of vanity.