The programme
This site is built as a plate book: a small set of numbered units, two type voices and one accent, printed on paper and bounded by keylines. Each project then replaces the colour underneath without touching any of it. These are the plates.
01Colour and material
One accent, rationed. Emphasis is inversion into a slate plate, never a brighter colour, which is why there is no shadow in this system at all. Every value below is a token in app/globals.css; a project scope overrides the same tokens, so Declutter's pages are this structure in Declutter's blue and Afropoly's in its gold.
- #e8e4daThe paper. Laid on a 160px grain tile.
- #efebe1A bounded region's ground.
- #d6cdbaA recess: wells and thumbnails.
- #7e837fThe keyline. The whole depth system.
- #3c4246Slate. Body, headings, inverted plates.
- #52565aSecondary text, labels, numerals.
- #b02e2eMadder. The only accent.
02Letterforms
Two voices and no third. A constructed geometric face with squared terminals carries every display line, caps only; one workhorse grotesque carries body copy, every label, and all data on its tabular figures — which is why this system needs no monospace.
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
0123456789
The text voice, at the measure every document on this site is set to: sixty-eight characters, which is where a reader can still find the start of the next line without looking for it. Numerals are tabular, so a date or a size never shifts the words beside it.
03Ornament units
Seven units on one 24 grid, one stroke weight, square joins. Each is derived from something true about the thing it stands for. None of them is an Adinkra symbol and none carries a traditional meaning: those are not ours to assign, and the one real Adinkra on this site ships with Afropoly and stays on its pages, credited.
- 01TeeDevsA diamond interlaced with a square, voided at the centre.
- 02DeclutterOne decision at a time, and it is binary: a diamond divided, one half committed and one half still open.
- 03AfropolyThe board is a square circuit with a pool at its centre. Two concentric squares and the centre, which is what the game actually is.
- 04TermsA plate of numbered clauses, which is what the document is.
- 05PrivacySomething held inside and not let out. Declutter's own terms put it as “your files stay on your device”, so an enclosure is the claim — not a padlock borrowed from the security-icon shelf.
- 06SupportThe same enclosure, with a way in.
- 07PlateA unit and the rule its caption sits on.
04Controls and states
The diamond flanks the primary action and nothing else: a working screen carries a dozen controls, and a mark on each of them is noise rather than a signature. A project's routes drop the mark entirely and keep their own control vocabulary.
A keyline and a ground. Nothing in this world floats, so there is no shadow to lift it with.
The emphasis device. A region turns over rather than changing colour.
The seam below is the band: the structural join between regions, assembled from the units of whatever is on the page. It is the only thing on this site that moves, once, on the index.