Volume 01.
Dark by default. Paper reserved for paper. Rounding reserved for marketing. A two-character mark that ends its own sentence.
An identity small enough to state as rules.
- Adopted
- 24 June 2026
- Named colours
- Six, each with one role
- Default corner radius
- 0 — sharp
- Still in use
- Consulting site and operator console
Light is not the other theme. It is the paper theme.
- Before
- Most systems ship light and dark as a pair of equals and let the reader choose which one they prefer.
- What forced it
- This product is a marketplace and a set of dashboards, but it also issues invoices and certificates — documents that are printed, or that pretend to be.
- The decision
- Dark is the default everywhere: portals, dashboards, the negotiation room, the consulting site. The light ground appears only where paper is the literal metaphor, and on that ground the signal colour swaps from lime to Neptune, because a lime that sings on Midnight is unreadable on Cheviot.
- What it changed
- Light later became a real toggleable interface mode as well, which the token file records honestly rather than rewriting the original intent. The rule it encodes still holds.
Six colours, each with exactly one job.
Every value is read from the token block that ships it, and every role is the role that file assigns.
| Colour | Value | Role |
|---|---|---|
| Midnight | #002233 | The ground. Dark is the default theme, not an option. |
| Neptune | #11425D | Raised panels and cards. |
| Isotonic | #DDFF55 | The signal. A fill colour, deliberately not a text colour. |
| Pacific | #C0D6EA | Links and quiet accents on dark. |
| Cheviot | #F6F2E8 | The paper. Print, invoices, certificates, the logo tile. |
| Kraft / Grape | #C9BBA0 / #C5C0C9 | Warm neutral / disabled states. |
Corners are a rule, not a taste.
Five radius tokens exist, and four of them are exceptions that had to argue for themselves. When a radius does appear, it means something.
| Radius | Where | Why |
|---|---|---|
| 0px | Cards, panels, every working surface | The default. |
| 4px | Inputs and tight controls | Small enough to read as a field. |
| 7px | Buttons | A thing you press may look pressable. |
| 12px | Marketing feature cards | Nowhere in the product itself. |
| 100px | Status tags | A pill is always a state, and only a state. |
The token file keeps its own mistakes.
Both of these are written as comments beside the values they produced. Leaving them in is the difference between a system and a stylesheet: the next person inherits the reason, not just the number.
- A label grey originally pitched against Midnight measured 3.38:1 on Neptune cards — and labels appear on cards far more often than on the page ground. Re-pitched for the surface that was actually failing.
- The tint behind signal chips had been hardcoded as Savison lime across 35 call sites. Invisible until a second brand arrived whose signal is yellow, at which point every chip in the marketplace wore a lime wash belonging to the wrong brand.
- Volume 01 has no separate written guidelines document. Everything stated here is read from the token file and the collateral built on it.
- The superseded hand-drawn mark is described but never shown — no clean export exists, and a brand element is either the real file or it is absent.
The PDFs come out of the design system too.
The pitch deck and brochure are HTML in the same token set, rendered to PDF by a script in the repository — so a palette correction reaches the deck the way it reaches the product.
deck pages
Built as HTML, rendered from source.
brochure pages
Same tokens, same fonts, same rules.
token set
Product, print and web from one source of truth.
verify · gate · settle
Savison Life pitch deck, June 2026
The full brand study, panel by panel.
Twelve rendered panels covering the palette, the typographic rules, the real marks, the geometry, the corrections and the stated limits — plus the other three lenses on this firm, and the four on the marketplace it operates.