Appendix — design specification, not client-facing
V6 "The Deck" — the website is the deliverable
Thesis: clients hire us for exactly one artifact — a board-ready deck. This site shows the product by being the product: title slides, an agenda, action titles, source lines, gantt timelines, takeaway boxes, a classification strip that reads PUBLIC — PRO BONO. One of ten competing design variants; content identical across all ten (see website/variants/content.md).
To our knowledge, no consulting website — student or professional — has done this literally. That's the bet.
Design system
The system in one slide
Palette
Desk #E4E6E4 (the viewer backdrop) · slide white · ink #1A2420 · 180-green #006B3C / deep #00522E · placeholder amber only in [TO COME] chips. Green is structural: action-title rules, gantt bars, agenda numerals.
Type
Libre Franklin 400/600/800 (the deck sans; action titles at 800 with a 3px green rule) + Source Serif 4 italic for takeaway boxes and the title-slide accent — the "written by a human hand" register.
Slide grammar
Every section is a numbered slide (n / total) with footer, classification, and a source line where a claim needs one. Action titles are full-sentence takeaways — the consulting convention that forces every slide to argue, not decorate.
Motion & honesty
No entrance motion at all — decks don't fade, they argue; hover states only. Placeholders are [TO COME] chips in editorial amber; the deck states out loud that it shows no logo it hasn't earned and pads no slide with invented statistics.
Method & extension
How it was made, and how the next person extends it
Build: hand-written static HTML/CSS, one stylesheet, no framework, no images — the slide chrome is pure CSS. Fonts self-hosted woff2 (~127 KB). Lightest possible footprint for the heaviest-feeling metaphor.
To extend: every new page is a new deck file (the header names it: 180DC_X.deck). Our Work becomes one deck per case — Situation/Approach/Outcome as three slides with real source lines; Impact is a data appendix; the murder-board stamp lands on cases that survived one. Reuse .slide, .fw, .gantt, .takeaway, .roster. Rules: every slide gets an action title that argues; every factual claim gets a source line; nothing enters a slide that couldn't survive a review.
Deploy: zip-deploy to Netlify via API (see website/variants/tools/deploy.ps1).
Critique & revision log
Rounds
Rev 0 — initial construction. Built from the shared content spec with all ten accumulated lessons from V1–V5 applied: no generic reveals (this variant has zero entrance motion by thesis), no symmetric-card default (the framework grid is a deck convention, not a SaaS wall), plain language on every control, no verbatim duplication between pages (the client page is a different deck), one placeholder register, correct field counts.
Rev B — Critic round 1. Verdict at round 1: "second or third — the only concept in the room." Top notes: the title slide broke the deck's own action-title rule (a category label, not an argument) and offered no door; the gantt clipped its labels on mobile; nine identical white cards flatlined the scroll; the agenda's page numerals floated orphaned; two slides carried large voids; the classification strip repeated into wallpaper; roster typography slipped. Changed: the title slide now argues ("You'd hire us for board-ready decks — so judge one: this website is it") and carries three file-chip doors in its right column; the gantt swaps to a stacked week list under 640px; two full-green section dividers added and all slides renumbered to 11; agenda rows got dotted leaders and remain working links; slides now hug their content; the classification strip became a live honesty indicator (SOURCED / [TO COME] / PRO BONO per slide); roles set in small caps with emails a size up; the chrome bar now echoes the current slide number as you scroll.