I think this is exactly right. Let me lay out the concrete plan.

The insight driving your approach is: **the personality is the filter, and that's intentional.** The kind of collaborators, advisors, and readers you want are precisely the ones who encounter a homepage that opens with intellectual warmth and curiosity and think *yes, this is someone I want to talk to*. The professional information is there for those who need it, but it's not the first thing — it's the second or third, placed where someone who's already interested can find it instantly.

Here's how I'd structure the page, top to bottom:

---

### The Plan

**1. Your name.** Large, in Spectral. Not centered — left-aligned, consistent with how essay titles appear on the rest of the site. No subtitle, no description line. Just the name. The site header and nav sit above it as usual.

**2. The introduction.** Two to four paragraphs of prose. This is the heart of the homepage and the thing that does the most work. It should be written the way you'd introduce yourself to someone interesting at a dinner party — not "I am a computer scientist" but something closer to what's already there, except tighter and more specific. The current introduction is good but it has two problems: the first sentence ("You have reached the website of...") is a web convention from 2003 that undersells you, and the middle veers into site-navigation explanation ("This website is organized broadly by Portals and Tags...") which is functional information masquerading as prose. Strip the navigational explanation entirely — readers will figure out portals and tags by using them, and if they don't, the search works. Replace it with something that communicates what you actually care about, what you're working on right now, what this place *is*. Your Me page demonstrates that you write about yourself with genuine flair. Channel that here, compressed.

The Latin welcome at the end of the current introduction (*Te accipio, hospes benignus*) is a lovely touch and should stay — it's exactly the kind of earned ornament that signals personality. But it should be the capstone of the introduction, not buried after a navigation guide.

**3. The professional row.** A single horizontal line of compact links, visually quiet, in Fira Sans at a slightly smaller size than body text. Something like:

> Biography · CV · Email · GitHub · ORCID · GPG

No labels explaining what these are. Anyone who needs your CV knows what "CV" means. This row is for the professor who just reviewed your paper and wants to know more, the potential collaborator who met you at a conference, the PhD committee member checking your background. They get what they need in a glance, without the homepage making a big deal about it.

Styled as a single line with middot separators, perhaps in smallcaps or with slightly muted color. It should be clearly present but visually subordinate to the prose above and the portals below. Think of it as a utility strip.

**4. The curiosities row.** A second horizontal line, same visual treatment as the professional row, linking to the unusual features of the site — the things that make levineuwirth.org distinctive and that signal to a certain kind of visitor that they're in the right place:

> Memento Mori · Build · Commonplace · Colophon · Library · Random

These are the easter eggs promoted to the front door. Someone who sees "Memento Mori" and "Build Telemetry" on a personal homepage and clicks them is exactly the kind of person you want reading your site. These links serve as a personality signal as much as a navigation element — they say *this site has layers, and the author thinks about infrastructure, mortality, and curation*.

This row should be visually parallel to the professional row — same size, same treatment — so that together they read as two lines of a compact directory. The professional row is "here's how to reach me in the conventional world." The curiosities row is "here's what makes this place unusual."

**5. Portal links.** Below both rows, after some breathing room, the portals. Not as cards. As a simple vertical list or a wrapped horizontal line, each portal as a plain text link. If you want brief annotations (and I think you should, because several portal names are ambiguous to a first-time visitor), they should be very short — five to ten words, in muted text:

> Research — formal inquiry and open problems
> Nonfiction — essays, criticism, living documents
> Fiction — stories and a novel in progress
> Poetry — verse, formal and free
> Music — compositions, scores, and recordings
> AI — on intelligence, artificial and otherwise
> Tech — systems, tools, and craft
> Miscellany — everything that defies category

Each annotation is just enough to tell a new visitor what they'll find behind the door, without turning the portal list into a card grid. The annotations should be in your voice — "everything that defies category" is better than "blog posts and other content."

**6. A "Recently" section (optional, add when corpus supports it).** Below the portals, 3–5 most recently published or substantially revised items. Title, date, portal tag. Auto-populated by Hakyll `recentFirst`. This is Direction B from your HOMEPAGE.md — the heartbeat that rewards returning visitors. I'd defer this until you have enough content that the list changes meaningfully between visits (probably 8–10 published pieces). When it's ready, it goes here.

**7. Footer.** As it currently is — the build timestamp, the license, the sig. No change needed.

---

### What's removed

- The card grid. Gone entirely.
- The "How to navigate this site" collapsible (already removed, stays removed).
- The contact row as a separate visual element at the bottom. The contact links are absorbed into the professional row (item 3).
- The "Random Page" card. Random moves to the curiosities row, where it fits perfectly.
- The "About" card. The Me page is linked from the nav and from the Biography link in the professional row.

### What's new

- The professional row (compact, one line, visually quiet).
- The curiosities row (compact, one line, same treatment).
- Portal annotations (very short, in your voice).
- The introduction is rewritten to be tighter and more personal.

### What's unchanged

- Your name at the top.
- The nav bar and portal dropdown.
- The footer.
- The overall monochrome palette and typographic system.

---

### Visual rhythm of the page

```
[nav bar with portals dropdown and settings]

Levi Neuwirth                              ← large, Spectral

Two to four paragraphs of introduction     ← body text, Spectral
in your voice. What you care about,        
what you're working on, what this place    
is. Te accipio, hospes benignus.           

Biography · CV · Email · GitHub ·          ← compact row, Fira Sans, muted
ORCID · GPG                                

Memento Mori · Build · Commonplace ·       ← compact row, same treatment
Colophon · Library · Random                

                                           ← breathing room

Research — formal inquiry                  ← portal list, Fira Sans
Nonfiction — essays and living documents   
Fiction — stories and a novel              
Poetry — verse, formal and free            
Music — compositions and scores            
AI — on intelligence                       
Tech — systems and craft                   
Miscellany — everything else               

                                           ← (future: Recently section)

[footer: license, build, sig]
```

The entire page fits on one screen at desktop width (assuming 3–4 paragraphs of introduction). There is nothing to scroll past, nothing to decode, no interface to learn. A reader arrives, encounters your voice, sees where to find professional information, notices some intriguing links, and chooses a portal. The page takes about 45 seconds to read, which is exactly right for a homepage.

---

### On the transition toward G

This design degrades gracefully into Direction G over time. As your reputation grows and the corpus deepens, you can:

1. Shorten the introduction to one paragraph, then to one sentence, then to nothing.
2. Drop the portal annotations as readers learn what each portal contains.
3. Eventually remove the professional row (it moves to the Me page permanently).
4. What remains: your name, the curiosities row (which becomes a signature element of the site), and the portal list.

Each step is a subtraction, and each subtraction signals growing confidence. The infrastructure supports all of these states without any engineering changes — it's just editing `index.md` and the homepage template.

---

### The one thing I'd encourage you to write first

The introduction. Not a draft — the real thing. Sit down, write it as if you're explaining to a curious stranger at a dinner party what this website is and why it exists, and what's on your mind right now. Don't worry about whether it's "good enough for a homepage." The Me page proves you can write this kind of thing with warmth and depth. The introduction is the same skill, compressed. Once that prose exists, the rest of the homepage design falls into place around it — it's just CSS and template work.