rono xiai needed a front door that could sell custom work to solo founders, with not a single client logo to lean on. it had to look like i know what i'm doing, load fast, and be something i own outright, not rent from a platform. the first client would be trusting the site itself as the proof.
i started where i always start. references, a mood, the feeling i wanted before a single screen existed. the hard part was always carrying that feeling into something real without it going flat and generic. so every choice here had to earn its place against that feeling.
the whole site is set in a typeface called averia. i wanted it because it felt right, and i kept it because of what it is. averia was made by averaging every font on its creator's computer. the version i use is the average of 725 of them. many fonts, resolved into one. i work under a seal that reads 見微知著, see the small and know the whole. so the mark says many into one, and the letters are literally many into one. the feeling came first. the meaning just agreed with it.
725 fonts, resolved into one.
the palette is a fusion of two rooms i love. a chinese scholar's room, warm wood and ink and rice paper, restraint, a carved seal on the desk. and american mid-century, with its warm golds and its one clear note of teal. so the ground is dark and warm like wood, the text is cream like paper, gold is saved for the one thing i want you to click, and the teal is the single cool note that keeps the warmth from going soft. it is deliberately not the white-and-blue that every ai tool defaults to. i wanted it to feel like a person with a point of view built it, not a template.
i built it on cloudflare workers as static files, not a website builder or a heavy cms, so it's fast and i own it, no monthly rent. self-hosted fonts, not google, faster and no tracking. my ventures live on their own subdomains instead of crammed under one roof, which costs me a little on search and i took the trade for the clarity. and i put my prices right on the page instead of behind a call, because if you can't afford me you should find out in ten seconds, not on a sales call.
this is the part i get paid for. i don't trust my own eyes on my own work, so i had the hire page cold-read by someone who'd never seen it. they told me the headline was a feeling, not a job, that they couldn't tell i even build websites. they were right. i'd led with my edge before saying what i do, and i rewrote it to say the plain thing first.
before — a feeling, not a job
after — the plain thing first
i design and build websites, stores, and the ai systems behind them.small change, big difference. i also caught a quiet bug that was keeping google from indexing the page at all, a mismatch in how the page pointed at itself. invisible unless you go looking. i went looking.
the thing you're reading this on. ronoxia.com and its pages, live, fast, mobile, and findable. you can click around the whole thing.
if you need a site that says the right thing in the first five seconds, that you own instead of rent, built by someone who catches what's wrong with it before it ever reaches your customers, this is what working with me looks like.