Why Every Tongue looks the way it does
Every Tongue Project is a small Texas ministry that pays, trains and supports mother-tongue Bible translators in 38 languages. The site has to explain a slow, careful process to churches that give, while protecting translators who work in places where their faces and village names cannot appear online.
- Built for
- Church mission committees, individual sponsors and prayer partners across the US, plus translators and consultants who check the site for schedules and downloads.
- Navigation
- Contents column. A right-hand contents list tracks where you are on long pages, the way a well-made book or report does.
- Pages
- Home, How it works, The languages, Translators, Sponsor, Pray, Visit us
- Hero
- One impact number is the hero (for example meals served this year), with a line naming the unit, a sentence of context, a row of three supporting figures and one photograph. The number counts up once when it first comes into view. Variants: a = the number spans the full width above the photo and figures; b = photo on the left, number and a ledger of figures on the right; c = the number sits on a coloured panel that overlaps the bottom of a wide photograph
Typography
The whole site is set in the IBM Plex family: Serif for headings, Sans for reading and Mono for labels and verse references. Translation is engineering with words, and Plex was drawn for engineers, with very clear figures and broad support for diacritics. One superfamily also mirrors the discipline of the work: consistent, checked, nothing decorative for its own sake.
Color
The red is rubric, the iron-oxide red scribes used for headings and initials in manuscript Bibles; it is also close to the color of a consultant's correction pen. The teal is verdigris from old bindings, and the background is the gray-green of ledger paper rather than parchment cream. In dark mode the rubric lightens to coral so it keeps its contrast on a deep green-black.
Layout and navigation
Long pages with a contents column on the right, because visitors here read. A mission committee preparing a budget report wants to jump to the figures, a prayer partner to the language they adopted. The column shows where you are on the page without hiding the main navigation.
The hero
The opening number is verses approved this year. It is the honest unit of the work: a verse goes on the count only after a consultant signs it off. It sits full width, large enough to read from the back of a church foyer when it goes up on a mission Sunday slide.
Calls to action
'Sponsor a chapter' is the primary action because a chapter is a real, fundable unit: about one month of a team's time. 'Adopt a language in prayer' is the second door, deliberately given equal weight on the home page, because many supporters will never give large sums but will pray for one people group for years.
Photography
Field photographs never show translators' faces in sensitive regions, and language names are replaced with letters where needed, which is standard practice in this field. Portraits appear only for team members who have agreed to it. We favour desks, pages and gatherings around a reading over landscapes, because the story is people working with words.
Accessibility
Every color pair passes WCAG AA in both themes, including the red labels. The contents column is a real ordered list of links, so screen-reader users can navigate long pages by section. Audio samples come with text, and nothing important is carried by color alone.
Type system
- DisplayIBM Plex SerifIBM Plex Serif was drawn as an engineer's serif: sturdy slab-like joins, tabular-feeling figures and a calm italic. It suits translation work, which is careful, technical and checked line by line.
- TextIBM Plex SansPlex Sans shares Plex Serif's skeleton, so headings and text feel like one voice. It is also built for diacritics and many scripts, which matters on a site full of language names.
- AccentIBM Plex MonoPlex Mono sets labels, verse references and stage codes the way they appear in translation software: plain, aligned and exact.
Colour and contrast
Every text pairing is checked against WCAG 2.2 in both themes.
Light theme
| Pairing | Sample | Ratio | WCAG |
|---|
| Body text on page | Aa | 14.13:1 | AAA |
| Body text on cards | Aa | 15.6:1 | AAA |
| Secondary text | Aa | 5.61:1 | AA |
| Links | Aa | 6.42:1 | AA |
| Button text | Aa | 7.37:1 | AAA |
| Accent label text | Aa | 5.87:1 | AA |
| Text on dark bands | Aa | 14.13:1 | AAA |
| Muted text on dark bands | Aa | 7.57:1 | AAA |
| Text on brand bands | Aa | 7.37:1 | AAA |
| Muted text on brand bands | Aa | 4.77:1 | AA |
Dark theme
| Pairing | Sample | Ratio | WCAG |
|---|
| Body text on page | Aa | 14.49:1 | AAA |
| Body text on cards | Aa | 13.06:1 | AAA |
| Secondary text | Aa | 6.54:1 | AA |
| Links | Aa | 6.59:1 | AA |
| Button text | Aa | 7.0:1 | AAA |
| Accent label text | Aa | 9.18:1 | AAA |
| Text on dark bands | Aa | 15.62:1 | AAA |
| Muted text on dark bands | Aa | 7.96:1 | AAA |
| Text on brand bands | Aa | 7.0:1 | AAA |
| Muted text on brand bands | Aa | 4.67:1 | AA |
Language K, northern Cameroon
Southern Quechua variety
Language M, Central Asia
Language R, Sahel
Language S, South Asia
A week of prayer for Bible translation