The brand system

Forbidden combinations: Fraunces 900 is never the logotype. The mono never sets the display statement. The newsletter has one name, and it is The Friday Email.

Two cuts, at matched cap height

The drift between the two cuts is shown rather than hidden. They are the same six-node topology; the micro cut carries the small-size optical correction (outer circle r42, counter 26 x 28.5 with no cant, ring 16u/13.5u). The hinge is --spur-cut-hinge: 40px and there are no exceptions to it, including inside the kit files, three of which violate it at their own declared intrinsic size and are corrected in wave 5.

Rendered, not described

Each specimen uses the cut its own size requires. Rasterised at a true 16px the mark reads unambiguously as a G, the spur survives and there is no grey band: the limestone-ground choice was tested rather than assumed.

Colour law

The third panel is the evidence, not an illustration: it is the real mark at the real fill, and it renders as nothing. That rule was earned by putting the draft on the footer flood and getting an empty box. Plain aquifer is licensed at 200px and above only.

The struck criterion

“Choose a face that rhymes with the mark” is removed from all future selection criteria, permanently. The frozen Spur was rendered beside seven serif capital Gs and five grotesques at matched cap height: every serif has a top beak and a spur descending below the crossbar, and the Spur has neither by an explicit decision recorded twice in its own provenance. All five grotesques share its construction exactly. Derivable from the frozen path itself (outer radius 41, inner ellipse 23.5 by 32.5 at -10 degrees): the Spur is a modulated grotesque G. Its construction is sans; only its modulation is serif. No text serif on the market will rhyme with it, so the charge cannot be answered by choosing a typeface.

Misuse

• Never tint the counter, and never break the rim.
• Never set the mark in ochre, palmetto or spring.
• Never put teal on aquifer-deep. The draft was rendered on the footer flood and produced an empty panel.
• Never use the display cut below 40px. That is what the micro cut is for.
• Never place the mark beside a capital G. A tile is not a letter; two Gs are a stutter.
• Never animate the mark.

Deferred to wave 5, stated so nobody assumes it shipped: all four lockup masters set live <text> with a Google Fonts @import and neither family is installed on the build machine, so the project’s own rsvg-convert pipeline renders them in substituted faces. They must be outlined, restated at legal intrinsic sizes, stripped of the .com tint, and logo-stacked.svg redrawn at 2.0-2.5C.

Spline Sans Mono sets what the reader does not read as a sentence. Fraunces sets everything else.

Mono’s job is a fact rather than a mood. The shipped Fraunces GSUB is [liga, rvrn] and carries no tnum. Spline Sans Mono is monospaced by construction, so every numeral column that must align is permanently the mono’s job. That is why a second family exists, and it is a better reason than “it looks technical”.

The scale

Ten steps. Anchored on 17px because 17px is what ships, not the 18px the old token claimed. The ratio is about 1.28 above the body step and about 1.20 below it: an accelerating scale, said plainly because the old comment claimed “1.25 (major third)” and was false in its own numbers. Each row is rendered live in its real face at its real size; the token name is the string a developer types.

Optical size, and the one line that must never come back

Default policy: opsz always equals the rendered size. Fraunces ships an rvrn FeatureVariations rule that swaps the wonky h m n s and the swash Et ampersand for plain forms and a conventional ampersand below its own threshold. The site pinned font-variation-settings: "opsz" 26 on body, which per CSS Fonts 4 beats the font-optical-sizing: auto declared immediately above it, so every surface sat above the threshold and the site downloaded a fix it then cancelled. The specimen below is the whole argument, and it is why the pin must not be restored by anyone fixing a symptom.

The threshold is opsz ~21.66 as the browser applies it, not the 18 in the raw FeatureVariations record: 18 is that condition denormalized without Fraunces’ avar table, which is not identity on the opsz axis. Everything the system sets at 18 still lands below it, so every ruling built on the number holds. Recorded here because the next person to dump the binary will get 18 and think this page is wrong.

Weight, leading, tracking

The fallback stacks

This is the subsection that would have caught the OG bug in four seconds. Two of the brand’s surfaces load no webfont at all, and their substitutions are invisible until somebody looks.

The payload budget

Adding an axis or a face is a byte decision before it is a taste decision. The rejected proposal to add SOFT and WONK measured +53,412 B roman and about +110,000 B with an italic, to buy an ampersand that deleting one line already fixed for nothing.

Colour encodes decisions, not taxonomy. Category is carried by typography.

Colour used to answer “what bucket is this row in”. Nobody chooses a Saturday night by bucket. Readers choose on: does it cost money, is it happening now, is this the good one, can I trust this listing. Those four rendered in zero colour while ten taxonomy buckets consumed the entire chromatic budget.

Every pigment, against every ground

The flags are not footnotes. Ochre is never text at any size. Ochre-deep is an EDGE, legal on ground and ground-deep only. Spring and shallow are dark-surface only. Admin-alert never appears on a public route.

The semantic layer

Thirteen aliases, zero new pigment. A semantic token never names a hex; it names a brand token, so a future palette change moves one line rather than fifty components.

Form carries, colour confirms

The same gallery twice: in colour, then with hue removed entirely. It has to survive the second row, because the measured luminances make hue unusable as the carrier: spring 0.2922 and ochre 0.2953 are the same value, and palmetto 0.1320 against aquifer 0.1166 is a ratio of 1.09.

Three box states, not four: no box, solid ochre, reversed aquifer-deep. Plus a strike and a pulse. Every one is legible with hue removed, which is required here rather than fastidious.

The graveyard

Ten pigments and four tints retired, with the autopsy, so nobody re-proposes category colour. Ten classes is above the ceiling for categorical colour under any conditions and far above it inside a four-hue palette; the distribution was pathological (FAMILY 42 and EVENT 22 were 52% of the home page); the taxonomy already collapsed before colour was reached, with family/community and sports/food byte-identical; and it failed in grayscale before colourblindness was considered. Two tints are still declared, marked RETIRING, only because wave 2 removes their last call sites: --color-tint-aquifer, --color-tint-ochre, --text-mono-label, --text-h4, --text-h3, --text-h2, --text-hero, --leading-hero, --leading-tight. Adding a call site to one is what pnpm lint:tokens is for.

The colour-budget rule

No single chromatic band may exceed 25% of a page’s rendered height. The event page is at 45.8% today and /submit at 40.3%, which is a colour rule with a layout consequence, and it is the mechanism that stops the brand’s balance inverting on the citation-earning template. Checkable, and currently failing on two routes.

Dark mode: no, and the costing is the reason rather than the taste. 24 hardcoded hexes are React props on the Boil components and cannot follow a media query; thirteen alpha composites need second values; the ledger doubles; and four off-site surfaces do not inherit at all. What ships instead is the dark SURFACE contract above (the flood, flood-deep and the plate, with nine verified pairings), which gives the dark register for a tenth of the work.

The Boil is the dataset’s own shape. Rings and dots when it carries data, flow lines when it carries the flood. It is never an icon and never a texture on the limestone ground.

The flood, as the footer of this page renders it. Its mask is now measured in PIXELS from the band’s bottom edge, not as a percentage of the footer. The percentage was tuned when the footer was shorter; the footer grew, and on every desktop capture the contour lines ran straight through EXPLORE GAINESVILLE, THINGS TO DO, FOOTBALL WEEKENDS, PROMOTE AN EVENT, FEATURED BUSINESS, NEWSLETTER SPONSORSHIP and four category links, reading as stray underlines on unhovered links. A pixel cannot drift when the footer gains a column.

Forbidden

• Below 64px, anywhere.
• Any viewport region where the Spur also appears at comparable size.
• Behind body copy, nav links or legal text.
• In ochre, or any colour outside the aquifer family.
• `fillN` on the limestone ground: the filled inner ring reads as a half-loaded image.
• As a preloaded asset for texture that is not legible at its rendered size.

The 64px hinge (--boil-min-ring: 64px) is a rule of the same kind as the Spur’s cut hinge, so it is teachable and enforceable. The Boil ships today at 22, 34, 72, 80 and six hero sizes with no governing rule at all.

The coordinate strip, the pulsing live dot, the sync stamp, the per-day counts and the “confirm details with the venue or organizer” line are the moat rendered. They stay visible on every surface and they stay in mono. Everything this system does to them is a repair, never a redesign: the dot gains a 1px ring, the stamp puts relative time first, and a stale state exists at all.

The stale state, beside the fresh one

Past 36 hours since the last successful sync the dot desaturates and the pulse STOPS. A freshness system that cannot express staleness is not a freshness system, it is a decoration containing a date, which is how /submit shipped a 34-day-old stamp under the same confident pulsing ochre dot as every fresh page. Relative time comes first because nobody diffs a date against today’s date, and that is precisely why the stale stamp sat there. Wave 2 builds the component; the two marks above are the target.

Hairlines, radius, the eyebrow

Motion reports. It does not perform.

Three sanctioned jobs and nothing else: liveness (the sync dot, and only the sync dot), continuity (expand/collapse, chip state, filled fields, pressed buttons), and arrival (the added-since mark, once per session, capped at six). Neither easing overshoots, and that is the point rather than an oversight: an overshoot says the interface is playful, and this product’s entire claim is that it is correct.

Never animates

page transitions · scroll-triggered reveals · parallax · counting-up numbers · skeleton shimmer · hover lift · shadow bloom · the logo or the mark, ever · the plot drawing itself in on load · anything auto-advancing · rows animating out of a filtered list

Reduced motion, stated properly: every duration collapses to 0ms EXCEPT --motion-instant, which holds at 90ms, because a colour crossfade is not vestibular motion and removing it reads as broken rather than calm. The pulse dot stops animating but does not disappear: it holds at its mid-state ring, so the liveness signal survives as a static mark. The load-bearing rule is that no information may be encoded in motion alone: strip the motion from any signal here and the static equivalent still carries the fact. A replayable on-page toggle for this contract is wave 3.

• No em-dashes in rendered copy. Code comments may use them.
• Invent nothing. Every event and attraction fact traces to a fetched URL in sources.md. Blocked sources are documented honestly, never faked.
• Founder facts are an allowlist: name, founder role, domain ownership, UF-alumnus status, reason for building, LinkedIn URL. Nothing else. No invented testimonials, stats or endorsements.
• Never assert a cadence the system is not currently meeting, and every freshness claim must have a designed failure state.
• Honesty on derived facts. first_seen means “the first ingest run that produced this row”, not “newly announced”, so the copy says “added to this calendar” and never “new event”. The default cadence string is “NOT LISTED AGAIN”, which is a claim about the dataset and cannot be wrong; “ONCE A YEAR” is legal only when the series registry supplies the edition fact.

Worked pairs, from real defects

Loading gets its own rule with its reason: NO SHIMMER. A shimmer animates where there is no data yet, which is a small lie in the same family as everything else here. Use a static hairline placeholder matching the row grid exactly, in ink-faint, with no animation, and reserve the stamp region’s width so it does not reflow when the real value lands.

Two of the surfaces are already on this screen and are the real components, not pictures of them: the masthead at the top of this page, and the footer nameplate below it. The rest are files, listed with where they live so a contractor can open them.

ICON POLARITY, declared: limestone ground is canonical. Four of five surfaces and manifest.ts already agree, and a field guide is printed. The reversed limestone-on-aquifer-deep treatment is the single sanctioned alternate, permitted only where the surface is a small crop against unknown host chrome, which means the social avatar and nothing else. The GNV · FL line is dropped from the avatar because it appears on no other icon.

This page is generated from brand/tokens.css by site/lib/brand/tokens.ts at build time, and pnpm lint:tokens checks that the two copies of the token file have not diverged, that every ratio it publishes is arithmetically true, and that no new arbitrary type or rhythm value has entered the codebase. Run it before you commit; just check runs it for you.