The design system

One global stylesheet, 184 tokens and a small vocabulary of Astro components. Everything below is parsed out of src/styles/ when this page is built — names, values, provenance, usage counts and contrast ratios. Nothing here is typed by hand, so the page cannot describe a system that isn't there.

It is also made of the thing it documents: the same layout, header, footer and stylesheet as every other page. The components in Components are the real ones, rendered with real content from the CMS. If a component breaks, this page breaks with it.

A colour picked for the brand, a Tailwind default that came along for the ride, and a token that arrived through a file merge are three different things, and a stylesheet cannot normally tell them apart. Here every token carries two annotations in its own source, and this page reads them back.

Reserve is not a backlog. Roughly two thirds of the palette is held rather than used, because this is a small site standing on a complete set of ramps. A gappy ramp is harder to design against than an unused one.

Six ramps, two alpha sets and a one-step sage. Modules never touch these: they consume the semantic layer below, and a grep gate keeps it that way.

The only colour surface a module may consume. Every alias resolves through to a palette step; the chain is shown so nothing is hidden.

Computed from the resolved values at build time, so these ratios go stale the moment a token changes — which means they can't.

Four faces from Arillatype.Studio, self-hosted. Only At Haüss carries the interface; At Gambit sets the reflection pull-quotes. The type ramp is fluid — every size below travels between a floor at 390px and a ceiling at 1920px, so the two numbers beside each specimen are the range it covers, not what it happens to be on your screen.

The heading ramp

Monotonic at both ends of the range: each step is smaller than the one above it at 390px and at 1920px. That matters because CMS content renders straight onto these — a case study can emit an h4 and it has to sit below its h3.

Two ladders that look alike and are not. --space-* is fluid: the number is the maximum, reached at 1920px. --size-* is fixed: the number is the pixel value at any width. Pick space for rhythm and size for anything whose dimensions you need to be able to reason about — a tap target, a hairline.

Fluid space

Every block on the site is the same three nested elements. Learn this and you can read any page in the repo.

section.section-container      full-bleed band, centres its child
  div.content-container        92% wide, max 1400px — the container
    div.metadata-container     80% wide, max 960px — the reading measure

One breakpoint: 767px. Grids collapse to a single column, the nav becomes an overlay, art-directed images swap to their portrait crops. Fluid tokens absorb everything between, which is why one breakpoint is enough.

The seven breakpoints live in base/breakpoints.scss as SCSS variables, not custom properties — a custom property cannot be used inside a @media query. They were briefly converted to custom properties in 2026-07, which silently made all seven inert; restored 2026-09. Use @include mobile.

Imported and rendered, not redrawn. These are the same files the home page and every case study use.

Button

ProjectCard

Case-study blocks

Rendered from live content

The layout of “Mobile Streaming in a Multi-Device Ecosystem” as the CMS returns it, through the real BlockRenderer: textBlock, mediaTextBlock, outcomeListBlock, quoteBlock.

Where things live

// @origin brand — what it is for, and why it exists
// @status reserve
--seagrass-500: #4E7C6B;