About

Making complex things genuinely easy to understand

Most explainer content falls into one of two traps: it is either too shallow to be useful, or too technical to be accessible. explained.guide exists in the space between.

Every page on this site answers a single question: how does X actually work? Not what it is. Not its history. How it works: the mechanism, the physics, the sequence of events that makes it do what it does.

Who writes this

explained.guide is written and built by Ewan Hendry. Every page here is researched, drafted, illustrated, and fact checked by one person rather than assembled from syndicated copy, which is why the site publishes deliberately and slowly. There are currently 34 explainers.

If you find something on this site that is wrong, imprecise, or out of date, that is a bug and it gets fixed. The published and updated dates on every article are real, not decorative.

How a page gets made

Every explainer follows the same pipeline, and no page ships until it clears all of it:

1. Research across at least two independent sources. Mechanism, component inventory, real quantitative figures, and the questions people actually ask.
2. Accuracy scoring. Each draft is scored out of 100 on factual accuracy, depth, completeness, and internal consistency. Anything below 95 goes back for revision. A dangerously wrong safety claim is an automatic fail.
3. Verification of every number. Figures in the comparison charts trace back to a named standard or a measurable, stated comparison, not to a round number that sounded right.
4. Building the visuals. Each diagram is hand written SVG or canvas, with the controls wired so that moving one input visibly changes the mechanism, the readouts, and the plain English explanation of what just happened.
5. Review against the brief. The finished page is checked line by line against the plan it was built from before it is published.

How we explain

Each topic page includes:

• Interactive diagrams you can drive with sliders and toggles, not static pictures
• A hero animation that visualizes the dominant physical phenomenon
• Key components explained in plain language before any jargon appears
• Practical tips that are specific, non-obvious, and immediately useful
• A curated FAQ sourced from real questions people ask

The diagrams are the heart of the site. They do not just label parts; they show energy, force, or information moving through a system. The goal is that driving the controls teaches you the core mechanism before you have read a word of text. Every visual also has a reduced motion fallback, so the same information is available without animation.

Topics we cover

Explainers are organized into 6 categories:

• Home Systems (9 explainers)
• Technology (11 explainers)
• Science (3 explainers)
• Automotive (4 explainers)
• The Body (4 explainers)
• Energy (3 explainers)

Built with

explained.guide is built with Astro, hosted on Cloudflare Pages, and designed to load fast on any device. Every diagram is hand crafted SVG. Every animation runs on canvas with requestAnimationFrame. No frameworks, no bloat. New explainers are announced in the RSS feed.