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Who writes this

BeyondReviews is a two-person studio. There is no content team and no agency. The names on the bylines are the two people who did the work, which is the only reason a byline is worth printing.

Simon Folmann

Simon Folmann is one of the two founders of BeyondReviews, a two-person studio. He works on the business side of the studio and writes most of the guides published here.Founder

Luca

Luca is the other founder of BeyondReviews and works on the product itself. He writes the guides on structured data and on answer engine optimization, and he signs the technical letters.Technical Lead

What is published here

Four trees, written to be read rather than to fill a content calendar. Nothing is generated and published unread, and nothing is republished with a new date to look fresh. When a piece changes, the revision date changes with it and the original date stays.

48

essays in the Journal, numbered as a runIssue I onward, dated and corrected in the open

91

guidesFiled under seven subjects, each opening with the direct answer

32

comparisons of review apps, including our competitorsVerdict first, and a stated note on where we fit

66

glossary definitionsEach one answers in its first sentence

The type

Display and headings are set in Fraunces, a variable serif drawn by Phaedra Charles and Flavia Zimbardi. The optical size axis is used, so a 68px headline and a 19px byline are genuinely different cuts of the same face rather than one drawing scaled. Body text and every label are set in Euclid Flex.

Neither face is loaded in italic. This publication does not use italics, so shipping the axis would be paying for something we have decided not to do. Emphasis is carried by weight and by the sentence.

Both are self-hosted, subset by unicode range so a reader of English never downloads the Vietnamese cut. No font CDN: partly speed, partly the law, after a Munich court held that hotlinking Google Fonts transmits a visitor's IP address without consent.

The colour

Three, and no more. Paper, ink, and one accent. The accent is used for structure and for display type, never for small text, because it does not carry the contrast that small text needs.

Paper

#F0EEE6Pantone 11-4201, Cloud Dancer. The ground under everything.

Ink

#050810Sable. Not black, which is why long reading does not glare.

Clay

#CC6633Terracotta. The only accent, and it is rationed.

The stack

Static HTML, built with Astro and served from the edge. Every page in the four trees ships zero JavaScript components. That is not a preference stated in a README, it is enforced: a guard runs on every build and fails it if a single hydrated component appears on a content route.

Three more guards run alongside it: one pins every URL with its canonical, hreflang and robots directive; one holds the brand rules; one reads the rendered HTML and fails on an empty heading or structured data describing something not on the page. All three had happened.

The measure is 624 pixels, which is about 68 characters of Euclid at reading size. Longer than 75 and the eye loses the return; shorter than 60 and it never settles.

The rules

There are a handful, they are absolute, and a build fails on some of them. No em-dashes. No italics. No exclamation marks. British spellings. Every date on the page is a real date.

The one that matters most is not mechanical: if a sentence could appear unchanged on a competitor's site, it gets cut. Interchangeable writing is a confession that nobody had anything to say.

We also compare ourselves to competitors in public, name what they do better, and say so on their own comparison pages. A comparison that only flatters the publisher is an advertisement wearing a lab coat, and readers can tell.

Corrections

Errors get fixed in place and the revision date changes. Where a fix alters the substance of a claim rather than a typo, the change is stated in the piece. Nothing is quietly deleted.

If you find something wrong, tell us and it will be corrected.