Design system Living Rendered from the live tokens

System

One system from editorial pages to dashboards. Everything on this site derives from what is on this page.
01

Tokens.

Colour is ink on paper with one blue. The data palette adds two reserved signals. Every value here is a CSS variable the site and the dashboards read.

ground--surface-ground
surface--surface
raised--surface-raised
ink--color-primary
muted--color-muted
accent--color-accent
positive--data-pos
negative--data-neg
Motion
hovercubic-bezier(0,1,.5,1)160ms
entrancecubic-bezier(.16,1,.3,1)600ms
revealcubic-bezier(.215,.61,.355,1)700ms
exitcubic-bezier(.4,0,1,1)280ms
staggerrow 55ms, char 38ms

Transform, opacity and colour only. Bars and lines draw once on entrance, never on data refresh.

Radius and rules
4812pill
rule 1pxhairlinedotted

Tags 4, buttons and inputs 8, cards 12, chips pill. No shadows; separation by ground contrast.

Spacing

4px unit inside charts and tables, 8px for cards, 24px panel padding, 24px gutters. Density modes: comfortable 24, compact 16.

02

Type.

Inter Tight, seven roles, tabular numerals wherever numbers align. One display per page.

display · 600 · clamp 42 to 170 · uppercaseDisplay
title · 600 · 42A scope agreed on day one.
section · 600 · 30Operator OS
lead · 300 · 18Fixed scope, fixed fee, fixed timeline, in writing before anything starts.
body · 400 · 14Weekly ships you can see and click, not status decks. You watch it come together in production.
label · 500 · 11 · trackedAds under management
number · 600 · 30 · tabular5,355 +12.4%
03

Components.

Three button roles, one tag, dotted tables, stat cells, panels, fields. Nothing else.

Tags and fields
CLIENTTEAMNew+12.4%-3.1%
Spend$0+8.2% vs prior
Orders0+11.4%
Blended ROAS0-0.12
New customer CAC$0-$11 vs prior
04

Charts.

Ink series, blue for the focus, a dotted baseline, last value labelled inline. No fills, no gridlines, no legends in colour. A fourth series becomes a table.

Line

Daily spend and orders

Bar

Spend by channel

Distribution

ROAS by ad, 43 live

Dots on a rule, not boxplots. Hover a dot for the ad. Blue marks the median.

States

Empty, loading, error

No data for this range
Loading
Sync failed, retry

Dotted outline of the chart area and an 11px label. No spinners.

05

Motion.

One vocabulary. Entrances rise out of a mask on an out-curve, hovers start instantly and settle, data draws once. Every demo below runs on the live tokens; press replay.

Display entrance
Dom Buckland
entrance · 700ms · 38ms per letter
Title entrance
A scope agreed on day one. A deadline that does not move.
entrance · 700ms · 55ms per word
Media reveal
clip 1.1s + settle 1.6s · entrance
Label swap
hover · 400ms fold · arrow 280ms
Arrive
Spend$302,919+8.2%
scale .96 → 1 · 900ms reveal · opacity 600ms
Count
0ads under management
1.4s · cubic out · tabular numerals
Data draw
800ms entrance · once · never on refresh
Page load
0
mark 800ms · count paced to real load · bar scaleX
Route change
Work
Services
ink wipe 620ms · overlay curve · content behind
06

Photography.

Real photographs only. The signature is in the treatment, not the subject: at rest an image is a fixed mosaic of tiles, and the photograph comes through the tiles on a slow diagonal sweep as it enters view or under the cursor. The mosaic never changes size; it is the composition, not a loading state. One look across cases, decks and dashboards.

Portrait · resolves in view
Product · resolves on hover
Place · resolves on hover
Rule

Tiles rest in the treatment and resolve on hover. Heroes resolve once, on entrance, and stay resolved. Never treat a product screenshot; UI stays sharp.

Recipe

Ordered 8x8 Bayer dither at a 3px cell, ink on paper, no colour. Blue stays in the interface, never in the photograph. Mosaic tiles are the frame width over 26, held fixed. Each tile crossfades to the photograph on a cubic ease, staggered along a diagonal with a 55 percent spread, 1.3s in and 0.9s out.

Why

Stock and client photos arrive in every colour and quality. The treatment makes them one set, keeps the page ink and paper, and the resolve rewards attention. It reads as built, not decorated.

07

Dashboard.

The primitives assembled on a 12-column grid. Dummy data, live interactions: filter, sort, range, theme and density.

Spend$0
Orders0
ROAS0
New customers0
Trend

Spend and ROAS

Mix

Spend by objective

Campaigns

Performance by campaign

CampaignObjectiveSpendOrdersROASCACTrend
08

Rules.

Colour

One accent. Blue carries meaning: the focus series, the active filter, the annotation. Positive and negative appear only on deltas. If two things glow, one is wrong.

Hierarchy

One display heading per page. Titles at 42, sections at 30, everything else 18 and below. Weight does the work; size stays on the scale.

Interaction

Hover shows a hairline cursor and a value. Sort by clicking a header. Filters are tags. Every interaction starts instantly and settles on an out-curve.