Rubric is a reading system for longform writing. Prose stays sovereign in a warm column; notes, references, and your place live in the margin beside it — tied to the line, never louder than it.
Open the reading roomThe column is the measure of the prose — kept narrow so a long passage stays intimate. Everything that serves the reading is tied into the margin you are reading now.
A page that reads like a critical edition — the line, and the room to answer it.
Most reading interfaces fight the text: cards interrupt the flow, bright chrome competes with the body, controls float over the words. Rubric does the opposite. It borrows the apparatus of an annotated book — the gloss, the rubric, the gutter — and gives the reader a place to think beside the prose instead of on top of it.
The single accent is a rubricator's red, used only to tie a note to its line. Gilt marks an act of honour — an editor's pick, an illuminated initial. The ground is lamplit and dark so the warm reading column glows like a page held to the light.
A marginal column for notes, citations, and your reading thread — each note tied to its passage with a hairline rubric.
An intimate column width that keeps long passages legible, with a pronounced lead-in and a single rubricated initial.
A warm ink-dark page so the parchment reading surface reads as a lit page, not a bright app window.
Kept in a back room of the Saltmarket bindery, the ledger had outlived three owners and two fires, and still its spine held. The apprentice traced the gilt tooling with a thumba and decided, against every instruction, to read it.
What she found was not accounts but a reader's hand: marginal glosses in a faded rubric, citations pencilled sidelong, and a thread of red ink running the gutter like a pulse. Whoever had owned the book had read it as a conversationb — answering the printed line in the open margin beside it.
Rubric ships as tokens, an embodiment, and a dashboard — one coherent reading system, ready to set your own longform into.
Read the colophon