A website as a research object: how we built the new chirale.it

Does the website of a research centre, a school and a production studio really need a content-management system, a database, a shopping cart, forms, admin panels, plugins that update themselves, cookie banners, newsletter pop-ups, and a cloud that bills by the second?

After spending a long time studying different products and architectures, the answer was: no.

Not right away, not in this form, not for what we want to tell.

The foundational choices

We worked with a small set of tools, each chosen for a precise reason. The page generator is called Astro: it produces static HTML at build time and ships JavaScript only where interactivity is really needed. The language is TypeScript in strict mode: every piece of content, every utility, every route is typed. CSS is written by hand, with custom properties for the tokens (colours, fonts, spacing, animations) and CSS Modules per component. No Tailwind, no CSS-in-JS, no client-side UI framework by default. The package is managed with pnpm, the site is hosted on Cloudflare Pages, and the deploy is a single command.

The site is trilingual: Italian, English, Spanish. Italian lives at the root, the other two languages under the /en/ and /es/ prefixes. URLs are translated where it makes sense: /chi-siamo/ becomes /en/about/ and /es/sobre-nosotros/. Proper names keep their original language: Chirale, Spazio Chirale, Punto Chirale, Tratto Chirale.

The interface strings, the articles, the glossary entries are text files organised by language and by section. Adding a translation means adding a file.

The result is four hundred HTML pages generated at build time, none of which exists as a database record. To the visitor, the site appears for what it is: a sequence of light, ready pages that are already there.

Content as data

One of the clearest choices was to treat content as data, not as documents handled through a user interface. One hundred and seventeen articles from the old WordPress site were exported as Markdown files, translated into three languages, and today live in the repository as three hundred and fifty-one text files split by folder and locale. Every article has a small front-matter — date, slug, cover, language, legacy URL — that is validated at build time. If a field is missing, if a date is malformed, if the cover image lacks alt text, the build fails before deploy. It’s an editorial safety net: it guarantees that every published piece of content meets a minimum standard.

Adding a new page, in this schema, means creating three JSON files (one per language) and three routes. An operation that takes ten minutes, with any text editor, from any computer. No new tool to learn.

No CMS, no cookies, no forms

These three absences, taken together, define the site far more than any technological choice.

No CMS. Publishing an article means opening a file, writing it, making a commit, pushing. The deploy starts on its own. There is no admin panel to defend, no user to manage, no password to rotate, no plugin to keep updated. The attack surface is close to zero. Version control is the native one of Git: every change is tracked, every previous state is recoverable, every contribution is signed.

No cookies, no banner. The site installs no tracking cookies, asks for no consent, shows no warnings to anyone arriving. Visit statistics, once we enable them, will be served by a cookieless system — no unique identifiers, no individual tracking. It’s a choice that simplifies our lives and the lives of our readers: a page that opens and immediately shows what it has to show.

No forms. The contacts are an e-mail address, a phone number, a map with the three sites on Via Ignazio Persico. There is no contact form, no newsletter sign-up, no booking wizard. It’s an editorial choice: whoever wants to talk to us, writes to us. The fact that there is no form on the site is verified by an automated test that fails if someone adds one by mistake: it’s a rule of the project, not an oversight.

The detail of the aesthetic choices

As designers of our own physical space, we approached the typographic identity of the site with the same care we devote to the gallery installations. Six typefaces coexist in the site, each with a precise role. Inter Tight is the typeface for headings; Inter is the typeface for minor interface — dates, labels, footer; IBM Plex Mono is the typeface for long-form text and project codes, and gives the site the digital-laboratory feel that belongs to us. Then there are two section exceptions: DM Mono characterises the Network page, where we host the communities we collaborate with; Old Standard TT appears only in the glossary entries, where it deliberately evokes the aesthetic of a printed Italian dictionary. A sixth typeface, Major Mono Display, is loaded but used sparingly, reserved for editorial accents.

The typefaces are all self-hosted: they live in our repository, are served from our domain, leave no trace on third-party services. A detail that adds a few kilobytes to the first load but gives the page back its autonomy.

The palette is essential: black and white, a warm variant of white for the large surfaces, a few greys for the thin lines, and a single accent colour — a sharp yellow, #FFD60A — that signals interactive states: a mouse hover, an open glossary entry, a link to follow. A visual grammar reduced to the bone, built to last.

A manifesto that you listen to

The homepage, before anything else, is an editorial act. Anyone arriving on chirale.it does not encounter a slogan and a big button: they encounter a silent scene waiting for a gesture. Click to trigger. A second click starts a piece we have called CONCORDE — Manifesto chirale, episode one: five low-frequency oscillators, a waveform of two hundred and fifty-six samples, a layer of dust and breath, a mesh pulsing in space. Thirty seconds that translate into sound and geometry what we do in the labs.

It’s not a decorative background, it’s an executable manifesto. The idea is that the website of a research centre on digital arts and digital fabrication should behave like an instrument, not like a brochure. For those who don’t want to or can’t listen, the visual animation is optional and respects prefers-reduced-motion: if the operating system asks for less motion, the scene stays still. The editorial substance does not depend on the audio: it serves those who choose to step inside.

What we learned

Opening a site like this, in a newsroom made of those who write the code, those who write the texts, those who choose the images, forces a kind of coordination that is not that of a platform. There is no friendly interface guiding you: there is a repository, a markup language, a pipeline. In return, every decision stays visible: a change is a commit, a choice is a file, an exception is a note in the comments. The site is at once the product and the documentation of its own process.

In this sense the new chirale.it is consistent with everything else we do in the labs: the training that feeds the research, the research that becomes production, the production that generates new training material. The instrument you are using to read these lines is itself a small prototype, built with the same gestures we teach. A gallery of process, on display in the window.

It is no coincidence that this article lives in the section of our site called Test before invest. It’s the service through which we accompany companies and institutions in trying out a technology, a material, a process, before investing in it at scale. We applied it first to ourselves.

If the story we have told here can serve your work — a website to be redone, an idea to be tested, a process to be reviewed — we are available in the labs, or at info@chirale.it.