Atlas

Nearly 2,000 years after Euclid wrote his mathematical treatise Elements, a Jesuit and a Ming Dynasty scholar finally began to translate the work into Chinese.

The former was a missionary from the Papal States, now the Marche region of modern-day Italy. Matteo Ricci carried a Latin edition of Euclid’s Elements with him for nineteen years as he worked his way inland from Macau in 1582, eventually becoming the first European allowed to enter the Forbidden City. His copy was edited by his former teacher in Rome, Christopher Clavius, and had itself been translated by way of Arabic.

Documentation is an open problem in web design. There are patterns and anti-patterns everywhere, replicated ad infinitum across ready-made templates. Templates are fast and easy, but risk treating docs as an afterthought rather than a core part of the product experience to design for the specific user. The consensus options are also often over-designed with visual effects. We believe docs sites need a simpler reading experience focused on content, leaving more elaborate designs to the marketing site (borrowing from the philosophy of the creator of Fumadocs).

But in a world where agents are the majority of docs readers, as well as docs creators, should you still design your docs site? Why should you even put effort into human readability and visual design?

Docs communicate a product and its scaffolding. They should help a user build a mental model of the product and how it works, guiding them along an intuitive flow and answering questions along the way. Docs must simplify concepts for new users and reveal complexity as the user advances.

There’s also a new reader. Agents are rapidly overtaking human users as first-class citizens, and they need specialized architecture to discover, read, and parse docs.

We’re excited to announce our first grantee project: Fumadocs, created by Fuma Nama.

Fumadocs is a beautiful and flexible React documentation framework. The framework has four modular layers: Core, Content, UI, and CLI. The architecture and visual design both flow from the core philosophical tenets of composability and simplicity. Each library is a set of “building blocks” which expose how they work, giving developers the ability to modify and create docs exactly the way they want. The visual design integrates elegant, performant components with minute attention to detail. It’s a blazing-fast reader experience for humans and LLMs alike.