Decisions
Decisions
Design-side decisions, newest last, one row each. The rules as applied live on the topic pages; brand decisions are recorded in planning 2608 (see MAINTAINING.md). The working plan these grew out of, with the options tried, is archived: design-system plan, 2026-10.
Decision log
| Date | Decision |
|---|---|
| before 2026-10-01 | Direction E (Warm Emergence) chosen; Polyamine is the heading font, Restora kept in reserve |
| 2026-10-01 | #1F338A rejected as call-to-action colour (too cool and corporate; blue is for depth, not action) |
| 2026-10-01 | Brand feel: authentic, grounded hope, built on polarity and integration (mountain and swallow, night and dawn) |
| 2026-10-01 | The pasted colour list (blue, red, gold, white, black) is for feeling only; colours are designed from the feel, not from that list |
| 2026-10-01 | Night to Dawn judged not working (some ideas worth keeping); stepped back to nail the feel first |
| 2026-10-01 | Feel draft 2: essence plus deep sourcing, crafted rigour, liminal integration; character "a little off-centre"; references added |
| 2026-10-01 | Essence decided: Grounded hope. Logo (swallow in fingerprints) recorded; Dark Mountain and Emergence studied |
| 2026-10-01 | Logo red is from the original handprints and adjustable; logo colours are not assumed to be the site palette |
| 2026-10-02 | Direction E v7: full-screen hero with the original centred header as an option. Woodcut set in system/graphics/woodcuts/ (mountains, swallows, leaves, wind, fruits, people in a circle) with a gallery. Fixed swapped photos (field.jpg is the scrolls, sylvie.jpg the woman in the field) |
| 2026-10-02 | Woodcut seeds added as graphic elements (sunflower, bean, maple key, acorn, pumpkin, stone, wheat, dandelion; spiral, scatter and row clusters). Direction E page rebuilt in the current system (v6) |
| 2026-10-01 | Pale yellow (#fbefc4) is a background colour only. No bright yellow, no yellow highlighting. Woodcut swallow added as a graphic element (seal, flock, divider). Logo shown as a white disc or square tile works well |
| 2026-10-01 | Feedback: the system has depth and rigour but lacks joy and poetry; black, white and red read as Japanese Zen. Trying a sunlight yellow (from the mood board field, not the Life Itself yellow) as light only, drawn swallows and suns, more people, a soft italic poetic voice |
| 2026-10-01 | Buttons are black. The logo red (#E5201C) is used only for occasional links in running text. Some sections sit on pure white |
| 2026-10-01 | Feedback on ink and paper v1: torn edge works; too dark overall, too many black-and-white images, needs more white and more joy. v2: near-white paper, softer grain, original photos back, one dark section only |
| 2026-10-01 | Ink and paper mockups built: A (no interface colour) and B (one process ink: red, Prussian blue or gold) |
| 2026-10-01 | First Night to Dawn build: mountain night, limestone dawn, first light (apricot) for hope and action on night, plum kept for action on dawn |
| 2026-10-07 | Publications: Seeds leads, Life Itself credited in text. Papers are the Seeds of Renaissance series (Wisdom is No. 6). At most one logo per surface; cover series line in the wordmark until a one-colour mark exists. Diagrams carry a signature (mark, wordmark, URL). New page: diagrams.md. Reasoning above |
| 2026-10-07 | Diagram signature: mark + name and URL in Apfel Grotezk, after mockups against the full lockup and text only. The mark on dark grounds (white disc or inverted) is a general logo question, not settled here. Diagram type is not Polyamine; a tryout of diagram faces follows |
| 2026-10-08 | Diagram type and style. Apfel only, no bold (title Regular, set apart by size), after the FT and the Economist. Drawing style "panels": ink lines, solid arrowheads, no outlines, groups as panels in a pale red tint that also marks the key area; the one allowed red ground. Hand-drawn wobble rejected; grey panels tried and rejected as too faint at 400px |
| 2026-10-08 | Wisdom cover: series line "White Paper No. N"; wordmark "of" in Fraunces italic (exception to four faces); one-colour (ink) mark allowed small at the foot of covers; credit one line, one size; covers should carry less. Reasoning under Q3 above |
| 2026-10-07 | Papers are built with Typst in pdf-report-publishing, not HTML paged media; print.md is the spec, system/tokens.css the values |
| 2026-10-08 | Papers approved (design-34t.22): typographic covers by default, imprint on the back of the title page, Polyamine only for cover, title page, contents and chapter titles, heads in Restora, figures bare on the page. One A4 PDF for screen, white pages. Reasoning above |
| 2026-10-13 | Logo chosen (Sylvie): the original swallow kept, with a cut-and-printed edge, 30% bigger, prints pushed out with a white gap; full mark at every size, no simplified small version; wordmark "of" in Fraunces italic tuned toward Polyamine; five colourways (colour, colour-dark, black, white, red) and five lockups. Files in system/logo/, shown in logos.md; record in archive/logo-2026-10/ |
| 2026-10-13 | Podcast episode cover signed off (Sylvie and Rufus): white ground; the black swallow flock rising from the bottom-left corner through the logo's fingerprints (prints only, 20%); the hook in Polyamine 112 at x 80; the guest's name in Apfel Grotezk; the horizontal lockup with PODCAST (Polyamine) under the name, no disc; the guest cut out, greyscale, on the right. Same ground for the Instagram posts. Chosen over versions A–D, sixteen backgrounds and the top-left layout (archive); a softer coloured ground is a later option. See podcast.md. |
| 2026-10-13 | Podcast ground: sunlight (Rufus): the swallows-and-fingerprints ground moves from white to --sunlight; a paper-to-sunlight wash is the documented alternative. Show art: mark and SEEDS of RENAISSANCE big, PODCAST small (in an app everyone knows it's a podcast), pure sunlight. Episode art: the square cover, made from the Instagram 1:1 podcast template at 3000 px. See podcast.md. |
| 2026-10-15 | Print elements keep their colours (Sylvie): the woodcut, linocut and engraving prints traced from the woodcuts mood board go into system/graphics/prints/ in the colours they were made in (black and logo red or print red pomegranates, faded green acorns and pinecones, faded blue hanging fruit, cobalt tulips and mountains, a gold sun, the swallow blue, ochre and pale yellow), not retinted to the system tokens. They are often used with a transparency over them that softens ink and colour together; how is to be worked out (Beads design-34t.52). See system/graphics/prints/. |