Design System
Primitives, brand devices and the physical card — every flat surface is a slice cut out of the infinite gallery tunnel. Void first, orange as a laser, data inscribed.
Color
Typography
Display · Space Grotesk
Card names & titles
Body — Inter. UI copy that stays quiet so the data can speak.
Mono — Geist Mono · 1a2b…f9c · 0123456789 · tabular-nums
Instrument Serif — the artifact's voice
Overline · uppercase mono · the connective tissueButtons
Badges
Inputs & keys
Surface & reticle
A hairline frame with the four-corner HUD reticle. The building block for every panel and card shell.
On hover the border lifts and the corner ticks wake — extend, snap to orange — in the same beat. Scanlines overlay on.
Stats
DNA strip
Elements · §2.4
Five elements, one triangle. Advantage multiplies damage by 1.25, disadvantage by 0.80 (§5.3), so the hue on a card is not decoration — it is the matchup. All five live in lib/elements.ts; they used to be copied into four components, free to disagree.
The brand accent. Rationed everywhere else, native here.
Reads as DEF on the card's stat panel too.
The only element that alters a stat: +5 CRT (§2.2).
The Runestone's element — the flagship collection.
Shares its hue with status-success; never used for status here.
▲ ▼ ✦ ◇ ■ are Unicode geometry, not drawn marks. They read at 8px and stay distinguishable in a row, which is why they have survived — but they are exactly the “generic” the geometric law (§4a) was written against, and they are the last borrowed thing in the visual system. A replacement has to survive the same three tests: legible inside a 110px MiniCard tag, in a battle-log line, and at 24px here.
The mark · Aperture v2
Portrait body at 0.6923, corner at 7% of width, stroke at 8%. The corner is the card’s rule; the stroke came from Brand Guide v1.0. The ratio is the one number here that is chosen, not derived — the card is 0.5686 and reads thin at this scale.
The ring and dot merge at a true 14px — the same failure that killed three of the ten concepts below. So the ring drops, the dot grows 0.375 → 0.48 of the body, and the stroke thickens to 10%. The three marks past the rule above are the small state; the favicon ships it.
The guide states 0.5686, draws 0.6923 and ships an asset at 0.7111 — three widths. The drawing won on eye. It claims 14px for the full mark; measurement says otherwise. And three oranges were in circulation — guide #FF6400, asset #FF5800, ours #ff6a00. Ours holds: ~120 occurrences audited, all exact.
Logo concepts — nothing adopted
Ten marks from two design passes, in two territories. The Aperture above is still the shipping logo; none of these is adopted. Each is shown at size and then at a true 14px — the size that decides a favicon, and the one that kills most marks.
Artifact
The current Aperture, with every ring a card instead of a square
Artifact
The DNA helix compressed into a monogram
Artifact
A card as a measured artifact — a ruler with one tick lit
Artifact
The letter O built only from the card's ratio and radius
Artifact
Card slabs stacked, cropped both ends, one lit mid-stack
Aperture
The aperture as a lens iris, blades caught mid-close
Aperture
The shipped corner-tick HUD promoted into the mark
Arena
Two sides bracketing one taut accent line
Provenance
A number line where one position, off-centre, is lit
Arena
Rank as distance — nearest is largest, and carries the laser
- 01, 03 and 04 collapse to the same silhouette at 14px— “card frame with an orange core”. Three of ten are the same mark at the size that decides a favicon.
- Only 05 and 09 touch ordinal culture — position in an immutable sequence. 09 says it most purely and is the weakest as form; 05 is the only mark that is at once ordinal-specific, card-geometric and legible small.
- 07 is disqualified by reuse — it IS the corner-tick device, and CornerTicks renders in 18 places across the product. The logo would appear accidentally around every Surface.
- No mark is all three things— distinctive at 14px, specific to ordinals, and inheriting the card’s geometry. Each gets at most two.
Geometry · the card's own proportion
Anything that represents a card is drawn in the card’s proportion, with the card’s corner radius. Never a square, never a circle. Three numbers, all measured off the card itself — ratio 0.5686, corner 7% of width, inner panel 4%.
The card · §11
◆ COMMON SAT
NO EXOTIC PROVENANCE
◆ COMMON SAT
NO EXOTIC PROVENANCE
◆ COMMON SAT
NO EXOTIC PROVENANCE
◆ COMMON SAT
NO EXOTIC PROVENANCE
◆ COMMON SAT
NO EXOTIC PROVENANCE
The front is the artifact; the back is the receipt — the facts that never change, and the QR that takes you to the card's public page to check them.
◆ COMMON SAT
NO EXOTIC PROVENANCE
6fb976ab49dcec017f1e201e84395983204ae1a7c2abf7ced0a85d692e442799i0
◆ COMMON SAT
NO EXOTIC PROVENANCE
◆ COMMON SAT
NO EXOTIC PROVENANCE
◆ COMMON SAT
NO EXOTIC PROVENANCE
◆ PIZZA SATS
22 MAY 2010 · 10,000 BTC
◆ COMMON SAT
NO EXOTIC PROVENANCE