Since 1972, we have kept it plain on purpose.
The Laboratories started as an engineering shop, not a publisher, and the directory has never pretended otherwise. Fifty-odd freeware tools, sorted by nested lists, served on a sage-green background chosen once and never revisited.
There was no design department to argue with. There was no CSS budget to spend. What existed instead was a taxonomy — disc, circle, square, three bullet levels deep — that did the sorting work a card grid would otherwise need styling to do.
“The link stayed blue because clarity outranks color-matching.”
No border-radius, no shadow, no breakpoint logic — a naked list has no layout to break. That was the trade worth making: optimizing for “never looks wrong” over “looks designed for one particular year.”
What follows keeps that same restraint, in a different register: one accent, generous space, and nothing added that doesn’t earn its place.