How this site is made

The idea

Letters patent were open letters: a public document, sealed, announcing a grant to anyone who read it. This site is the Centre’s open letter. Its work is printed in ink on paper, set like a law report and drawn like a patent sheet, and what the Centre says in its own voice carries its seal.

Colour

Vermilion, the red of sealing wax, taken from the square in the Centre’s own mark. It marks what is official and what asks something of the reader: notices, deadlines, section marks, the seal. Everything else is ink on warm paper. The three subjects take the three colours of the mark’s petals: saffron for innovation, green for intellectual property, teal for competition. After dusk the site turns to Lamp, the same page read by lamplight.

Type

Two faces from one foundry. Newsreader, a serif drawn for long reading on screens, carries every headline and paragraph. Spectral, in its true small capitals, carries the labels, the navigation and the filing numbers, as small capitals do in a law report. Paragraphs are indented rather than spaced, figures in running text are old-style, and sections are marked with the section sign, as in a statute.

Notices

Everything the Centre announces goes on one notice board: its own notices, every event, and its policy input. Each is numbered by year in the order it was posted, as notifications are in a gazette, and the board is also published as a feed.

Drawings

The drawing on the home page is generated line by line in the manner of a patent engraving: outlines, then hatching whose density follows the shadow, printed in ink with a second plate in vermilion. As in a patent, it comes in two figures. FIG. 1 shows the Centre whole, one instrument; FIG. 2 takes it apart and numbers its parts, and each part opens a section of the site. The engraver draws FIG. 1 when the page opens, then opens it into FIG. 2; the title block switches between them. A part with something open, such as the bell when a notice is open, is inked in vermilion.

Filing numbers and rosettes

Each filing carries a number and a guilloche rosette, the pattern of banknotes and stamp paper, drawn from that number. The same number always draws the same rosette.

Strata

Volume I maps pharmaceutical patent law in India from 2005 to 2016. Its data is a pilot: every date, holding and link is to be checked against the judgments before it is cited.

Design and development

The site was designed and developed by Yug Nema.

Content and build

The text of the Centre’s projects, programmes and people was carried over from the earlier ciipc.org. Its events come from the Centre’s own record of them, kept since 2016 and set here as a series of law reports. The site is static, built by a short Python script from plain data files, and readable without JavaScript.