For minds that wander

Your shelf · What helps, and why

Each feature is aimed at a specific way of losing the thread

The who-said-that backtrack. In a long stretch of dialogue, the tags fall away and the quotation marks blur. We give every speaker one color for the whole book — when your attention comes back from wherever it went, the color is still there, and you know instantly whose line you are in. No counting paragraphs backwards.

The where-am-I backtrack. You look up from the page; the kettle, the group chat, the day intervenes. The banner at the top of the page quietly holds the scene — place, narrator, time — so coming back costs one glance instead of three pages: Wuth. Hts · Nelly → Lock. · c. 1780.

The drift. Eyes can slide over words while the mind is elsewhere; ears are harder to fool. Press play and the audiobook reads the page you are on, at your speed, stopping when the page ends. Two senses on one path holds the rails better than one — and when one slips, the other keeps your place.

The noise. Three quiet themes, a typeface menu that includes OpenDyslexic, generous spacing, and nothing on the page that blinks, counts, or congratulates you. The book is the only thing happening.

Your shelf · One more thing

Built by a reader who needed it

Chromatics exists because its maker loves books and reads in stolen moments on a phone, with an attention span he describes as a housecat. He looked into what actually helps a wandering mind hold onto a long book, built it, and then used it to finally finish the novels he had been starting for years — Ulysses, Madame Bovary, Wuthering Heights among them. We hope it does the same for yours.

Your shelf · Where to start

A good first book

Wuthering Heights is featured now — free in full, with the audiobook matched in, and famously the book where everyone loses the thread (there is a family tree for that). If your eyes are part of the story too, the dyslexia page covers the typeface and themes in more detail.