Why my security blog looks like a chalkboard

Open ten cybersecurity websites and nine look alike. Dark blue background, padlocks, hexagons, maybe a terminal with a green glow. It’s the aesthetic the industry chose for saying “serious business happens here”. When I started thinking about this site I knew exactly one thing, I didn’t want to be the tenth.

Not because those sites are ugly. But because that aesthetic says nothing about how this work actually gets done. The real moment of security isn’t the green terminal in the dark. It’s when you have to explain something to someone. A risk, a vulnerability, the reasoning behind a decision. And when you explain something complicated, where do you end up? At a whiteboard. Drawing arrows, circling what matters, writing and rewriting until it’s clear.

That’s the concept. This site is that board.

flowchart LR
    A["Complex<br/>concept"] --> B{"How do you<br/>explain it?"}
    B -->|"formal slides"| C["Everyone nods,<br/>nobody got it"]
    B -->|"at the board"| D["Arrows, circles,<br/>erasures"]
    D --> E["Actually<br/>understood"]
    classDef blue fill:#84a6ff,stroke:#1a1c20,color:#1a1c20
    classDef red fill:#ff7a74,stroke:#1a1c20,color:#1a1c20
    classDef yellow fill:#fad65c,stroke:#1a1c20,color:#1a1c20
    class A,D blue
    class C red
    class E yellow

“Serious” and “formal” are not the same thing. Formal is a uniform. Seriousness lives in what you say, not in the suit you put on it. If anything, I suspect the opposite is true. When the substance is there, you can afford to take the uniform off. The board is where security stops being theater and becomes understanding. It’s informal by nature, full of erasures, crooked arrows, imperfect handwriting. And yet that’s where ideas actually get across.

Once you pick the metaphor, the rest follows on its own. Handwriting instead of corporate typefaces, a yellow highlighter instead of bold text, marker colors by day and chalk on slate by night. Things get written as they come into view and then they stay, like on a real board. Nothing is decorative for its own sake. Every detail exists to make reading feel more natural, closer to someone explaining something to you in person.

A security blog can look like a notebook and be built with paranoia. I’ll take that over the opposite any day.