The MFH Brand Book

Jost 300, 16.8px, line height 1.8. The same on every article and on every page of running text.

Cormorant Garamond, 19.2px, under the title in the article banner. Section intros (.sub) are Jost 300, up to 18.4px.

Any sentence someone reads is at least 14px: dates, summaries, prices, store names, fine print, captions, the passport line. Shop prices are 15px. The one exception is a line in a fixed-width card that 14px would cut off.

Jost 500 capitals with letter-spacing may stay at 9.5 to 12px: kickers, badges, tabs, buttons.

The H1 is the title the reader sees first: the masthead on a landing page, the title on an article, the page heading on a tool. A title inside a card or a selector is an H2.

An article carries exactly one of the seven subjects. It decides the Journal filter, the hub page that lists it, and the drawing family.

A navy band mid-article points to the main quiz or tool for the topic; a smaller cream card at the end points to a second one. Both are written into the page as real links.

Do not add an eighth subject without a hub page, a filter button and at least five articles to fill it.

Quiz and tool tags are the Journal subjects. A reader who filters by Fashion & Beauty sees the same word on the quiz hub.

A quiz is short enough to finish in a queue. The result is a verdict, not a score sheet.

Every quiz, tool and adventure has its own square drawing, reused wherever it is promoted.

The result screen is built to be screenshotted and sent. Tool results carry Share and Print buttons (result-actions.js): Share opens the phone’s share sheet or copies the link; Print gives a clean one-page version.

At the result, with a line saying it also joins the letter. The email is the price of the result: the verdict is never shown before it.

After the result: how it was (Loved it, Fine, Not for me), and why, when it was not Loved it. The answers become tags and decide which quizzes get shorter.

A new form gets its own KEY so its conversion rate can be read on its own: guide-article-end, not article.

Event names are snake_case. No email or name ever goes into an event or a web address. Search terms are the one free text sent, and never contain a name we asked for.

The link works without JavaScript. The attribute only adds the count.

Every form that asks for an email states what arrives and how to stop, with a link to the privacy page.

They are the low-effort way in. The email is asked for once, by a separate form that says so.

A vote result appears on the reader data page once it has twenty votes.

Questions sent to Ask and vote splits decide what gets written next. They are never sold or shared with a brand.

No advertising pixels, no retargeting, no sold lists. The privacy page lists every place data is collected and must be updated with each new one.

Each article opens with the short answer. That is what gets quoted by search engines and AI assistants.

Seven hub pages link every article in a subject, so nothing is more than two clicks from the homepage.

search-index.json lists every article, recipe, dinner, quiz, tool and page with its drawing. It is rebuilt by build-search.py whenever something is published.

llms.txt lists what the site is and where the best answers are. sitemap.xml and feed.xml are kept current with every new page.

What our readers say publishes vote results. Original numbers are what other sites link to.

An answer is written only from our own articles, in his voice, kept short and marked as AI. There is a daily limit per visitor.

What people ask is logged, without names, and read when planning what to write.

The same for everyone: the wordmark, our garden photo and how it started, three quizzes (Parisian lips, American coffee, dinner wine), Ask, and New this month. Short.

Three articles that fit the month, swapped at the start of each month alongside the homepage edition.

Every image in an email is a file already live on the site, linked with its full address. No email-only copies to forget to upload.

A sign-up from a form that offers the guide gets the guide email instead. Mailchimp decides from SOURCE.

The French Household Field Guide, a PDF. The version number is on the cover so copies can be told apart. Currently 2.0: rewritten in Elizabeth’s voice, with the current drawings. Built from guide_content.py by build-guide-pdf.py.

Elizabeth’s voice, in the first person: funny, sweet and lighthearted. A little snapshot for now, meant to grow into something much bigger for everyone craving more France. Warmer than the Journal, never a lecture, and never a made-up story about us.

Our letters. Plain, written by her, approved by him. Opens with the first name when we have it.

An unsubscribe link and a postal address.

The Approuvé seal marks editorial verdicts only. It never appears on an affiliate link, a sponsored placement or a brand’s own packaging. The moment a verdict can be bought, the seal is worth nothing.

MFH Approved answers “is this actually French?” — researched, dated, sourced. Chic or Pas answers “does he like it?” — fast and opinionated. They never share a mark.

Every icon is stroked with currentColor, so it takes the colour of whatever contains it. Never edit a colour into an icon file — set it on the parent.

Gold is the accent. On any given block, one element gets it. Two gold elements competing is the fastest way to make a page look cheap.

Gold text needs a dark ground to pass contrast. On cream, use blue for text and keep gold for rules, borders and stamps.

Anything written by a model says so next to the answer: “Written by AI from our Journal, in his voice.” It never invents a quote, an anecdote or a fact about the family.

An illustration decorates a page. It is never the og:image or the schema image of an article — those are the og-<slug>.png cards.

Each form that asks for an email says what arrives and how to stop it, with a link to the privacy page. Votes and questions to Ask never ask for an email.

Images and scripts are linked with a version tag (?v=2026100701). Change the file, change the tag, or returning readers keep the old one.

A row of articles or quizzes is a swipeable carousel: arrows on a desktop, swipe on a phone, cards the same height. The homepage has no filter toggles. Le Journal keeps its subject tabs because each one is a link to a subject page.

Homepage sections sit edge to edge, each on its own ground, never the same ground twice in a row. The space lives inside a section (about 50px top and bottom on a desktop, 42px on a phone), never as a gap between two.

An article shows its drawing once, in the header medallion. The same drawing is never repeated in the body, and the header never pushes the text down more than the old gold rule did.

Contact details, links and calls to action appear once on a page. The email address lives in the footer; a section does not repeat it.

It opens once, after 5 seconds, on exit intent or at 30% of the page. Never for subscribers. Closing it snoozes it for 14 days and leaves a small tab. Every step is tracked in GA4 and L’Audience.

The Read & Play carousel has one rule per month, with next month’s first two picks from the 22nd, then evergreen pages. At least three quizzes or tools in ten cards.

Nav and section labels are English. French is kept for proper names — Malgré Lui, Le Bulletin, La Tribune — and for editorial furniture inside articles: En bref, Les faits.

Nothing goes live until one of us has read it. Facts that could be wrong are checked or cut.

No made-up quotes, anecdotes or family details. A personal note is written by the person who signs it.

Ask says it is written by AI, next to every answer.

Each agent owns its files. Work crosses between them as written instructions, not as edits to the other’s pages.

API keys and passwords are typed into the server or the service itself, never pasted into a chat.

If a line sounds like a machine wrote it, it is rewritten. The verdict comes first, the sentences are short, and nobody explains the joke.

Static HTML on shared hosting. Scripts stamp the shared parts (menu, footer, forms, article blocks) into each page.

Menu, footer and article blocks are edited in their script, never page by page.

No new folders. A new page or image goes beside the others.

Quizzes, tools and the quiz hub are built separately from articles and the rest of the site. Neither overwrites the other’s files.

Read before editing, confirm each replacement matched once, test at 390px and 1280px, audit links.

Before a page is replaced, the live copy is checked against the last known version, so an edit made on the server is never overwritten.

Check the DAM before asking for a drawing. A new one is made only when nothing on the server fits.

Each edition gets a number on the page and in GA4. What changed and why goes in the editions log.

API keys and passwords live in a server file that is never put in a zip, an email or a chat.

Each page carries the CSS for what shows first (header, banner, contents) in <style id="crit">; styles.css loads after it. Do not move those blocks into styles.css, or the header paints late.

A shared block is identical on every page that has it. When it changes, every copy changes in the same release. A scan of repeated blocks checks for drift.

Scripts and styles are cached for 30 days, so a changed file gets a new ?v=. nav.js loads search.js, which loads passport.js: a change to passport.js means a new version in search.js, in nav.js and on every page.

Every colour, including the extra shades, is named in :root of styles.css (--gold, --gold-deep, --navy-light, --wordmark…). New CSS uses the token, not the hex.