Components
In active development
The reusable parts a page is assembled from: headings, records, callouts, quotes, specimens, tables, status labels, navigation.
System
What gets built on top of the foundations
The foundations decide the rules. This is where those rules become things you can actually use: the parts a page is assembled from, the ways they combine, the words that go in them, and the judgement about how it should all look.
The five system sections
Patterns
In active development
How components combine into whole surfaces: page templates, section rhythms, report layouts, proposal and presentation structures.
Content System
In active development
How the writing works: voice, vocabulary, the words I avoid, headings, buttons, microcopy, and the rules that keep punctuation out of the way.
Art Direction
Published
How the brand looks beyond type and colour: five visual principles, the three classes an image may belong to and the one it may never, motion, and the restraint that keeps them honest.
Imagery
In active development
The picture library itself: one portrait, ten grounds in five theme-paired forms, what each weighs, and the artefact photography that does not exist yet.
How it is governed
One source for every rule, and it fails loudly rather than drifting quietly
Every value in this system lives in exactly one place. Everything else reads it. The chapters are the source; this website, the illustrated chapters and the report templates are all publications of those chapters, and none of them is allowed to state a rule of its own.
That sounds like bureaucracy until you have watched the alternative happen. A value gets corrected in the implementation, nobody updates the specification, and eighteen months later two documents disagree and neither knows it. This repository has met exactly that failure, which is why every generator here has a check mode that fails when a published page no longer matches its source.
The same discipline applies to status. Nothing here is described as approved because it passed a check. Passing a check is evidence that something is ready to be looked at. Approval is a separate act, and one person does it.
What is written down, and what is not
Four of these five sections are in active development, and one has not been started. The work behind them mostly exists. What does not exist yet is the written specification, and until it does I would rather say so than publish a page implying otherwise.
Each section page below says what it will cover, why it matters, and what governs that domain today. That last part is the useful one: in almost every case the rules are already being followed, they are just being followed from somewhere else.
Start with the foundations
Nothing in this section makes much sense before the foundations do. Components inherit their type and colour from them, patterns inherit their rhythm, and the art direction is mostly a set of consequences of decisions taken there.