Project
Vellum
A reading surface for close attention — where a passage is met before it is explained, and the margin answers back.
For five hundred years the page held a conversation in its margins. Vellum gives that instinct a surface again — somewhere a reader's notice has room to live beside the text, not buried beneath it.
Overview
Built around the reader's hand, not the algorithm's.
Most reading tools optimise for throughput — highlights you never revisit, summaries that read for you. Vellum starts from the opposite premise: that attention is the scarce material, and the interface should protect it rather than spend it.
The text stays primary and unmarked. Everything the system offers waits in the margin, drawn only when asked, and returns there when you move on. Nothing is hidden and nothing is locked — what changes is only where you are on the page.
Let's make one thing clear: a margin is not a comment thread. It is the reader's own hand, answering a line in the blank edge of the page.
“The text stays on the shelf. This sits beside it, holding the shape of how it thinks, and waiting for whatever you notice.” On the design of Vellum
The Vision