Colophon — design specification, not client-facing

V10 — The Ledger

Thesis: radical transparency as layout — an open account book where every factual claim carries a numbered entry in a visible evidence margin, unverifiable lines are struck through as "cannot claim yet," and the footer is a public changelog. Quote-or-abstain, the branch's deepest principle, turned into architecture. To our knowledge no consulting website anywhere does this.

One of ten competing design variants; content identical across all ten (see website/variants/content.md).

The system

Specification

S.1Paletteledger paper #FCFBF6 · ink #1E241F · 180-green #00693C/#00512E for verified matter · terracotta #9A4A38 exclusively for the strike-through of unclaimable lines · pending amber only in entry-pending chips. Color is semantic here or it is absent.

S.2TypeSpectral 400/600 + italic (the bookish register credibility is set in) with IBM Plex Mono 400/600 for entry numbers, postings, statuses, and tabular figures.

S.3Layouta two-column spread: content plus a 300px sticky evidence margin. On small screens the margin becomes an end-of-page evidence block — footnotes when the page narrows, marginalia when it can afford them.

S.4Devicessuperscript [E1] refs that highlight their margin entry on hover · the opening-balance table with struck unclaimable rows · engagement as dated postings · the changelog footer as the page's own audit trail · double-rule masthead and colophon.

S.5Motionnone. Ledgers do not animate. The only dynamic behaviour is the hover link between claim and evidence — meaning, not movement.

S.6Honesty devicesthis variant IS the honesty device: the strike-through row is the signature. Missing content is either a struck line ("cannot claim yet") or an entry-pending chip — nothing is hidden, nothing is faked.

Method & extension

How it was made, and how to extend it

Build: hand-written static HTML/CSS, one stylesheet, no framework, no images (~94 KB of self-hosted woff2 is the entire asset budget). The margin is CSS grid; the claim-to-entry hover is eight lines of optional JS.

To extend: every new page opens a new account. Our Work becomes the ledger's proudest section — each case a set of postings with client-consented evidence entries; Impact is the day the struck rows get un-struck, which is itself a story worth a changelog entry. Rules: no factual sentence ships without an entry or a strike; entry numbers never get reused; the changelog is append-only.

Deploy: zip-deploy to Netlify via API (see website/variants/tools/deploy.ps1).

Critique & revision log

Rounds

v1.0 — initial construction. Built from the shared content spec with all accumulated lessons from V1–V6 applied: zero entrance motion by thesis, no card walls, plain controls, no cross-page duplication (the client page is its own account with its own F-series entries), semantic color only. Awaiting Critic round 1.