openpencil/crates/op-ai-skills/skills/style-guides/dossier-linen.md

name	tags	platform
dossier-linen	light-mode monochrome editorial corporate enterprise serif monospace cjk-type austere quiet sharp-corners flat	slides

Style Scope

This guide is self-contained and written for a document memo deck — a run of pages that are read, not presented. Every page is a sheet that can be pulled out of the folder and understood on its own; nothing on it depends on the page before it. Apply this palette, grid, and type treatment only when this exact guide is selected; do not borrow dashboard, keynote, poster, or landing-page patterns into it. Treat unnamed layout frames as structural by default: no fill, no stroke, no cornerRadius, no shadow, unless the node is deliberately the binding rail, a quote block, a decision block, or a table band. Hierarchy comes from clause numbering and from where a line starts on the grid — never from a card shell.

Style Summary

Linen paper with file ink on it. The ground is #F3EEE4, the warm-grey yellow of a linen document envelope — chroma 0.014, which is what makes it read as official stock rather than a cream journal page or a newsprint tint. Above it there is one colour and one only: a rust thread at chroma 0.090, and it is allowed to be a binding line, a page number, and a clause number. Nothing else.

This is the "high density ≠ small type" reference deck. Its body density is the highest in the whole system, and its type floor is identical to every other deck's. Density here is bought with line length, paragraph structure, and where the whitespace is spent — never by shrinking the body. Body 30 at line-height 1.8 is the absolute floor of this style. When a page will not fit, you delete a clause or add a page. You do not go to 28.

Two derivations are load-bearing and should not be re-tuned:

• One chromatic ink, on purpose. A memo persuades through structure, not through colour. A second hue would send the reader hunting for "the highlight colour", and in this deck the emphasis lives inside the sentence.
• Rust stops at chroma 0.090. Pushed to 0.13 and above, the binding line stops being a thread and starts reading as a red annotation rule — a different meaning entirely.

Key aesthetics:

• Linen ground: #F3EEE4 at chroma 0.014 — paper stock, never a panel colour
• A single chromatic ink: rust, on the binding rail, folio numbers, and clause numbers
• Zero bullets anywhere: numbered clauses and whole paragraphs, at most a ruled table
• Asymmetric margins: 216 left, 120 right — the binding takes the difference
• Tables, never charts: this deck reports; it does not present
• Radius 0, no shadow, no gradient, no icon, no photo, no card
• The rail never moves: same x on every page, and so is the body start

Color System

Ground

Token	Value	Usage
Linen	#F3EEE4	Page ground. Every page, no exceptions
Linen Band	#EFE9DE	Table zebra rows only. 14.00:1 under file ink
Linen Deep	#E6DFD3	Quote blocks and decision blocks. 12.77:1 under file ink

Three steps at hue 80-82, separated by lightness alone (0.950 / 0.935 / 0.905). The steps are deliberately close: they mark a change of register, not a change of surface. If a block needs to be seen from across the room, this is the wrong deck.

Ink

Token	Value	Usage
File Ink	#201C19	Body copy, section titles, table text. 14.63:1 on linen
Soft Ink	#56524E	Secondary lines, source rows, table headers. 6.70:1
Faint Ink	#746F6B	Folio labels and clause numbers when unaccented. 4.29:1

All three sit at chroma 0.008 hue 60 — a warm near-black rather than a true black. A neutral grey secondary tone goes cold against linen within one step and reads as a different document.

Rule and Thread

Token	Value	Usage
Hairline	#C0BDB8	1px rules: table lines, question/answer separators, folio underscore. Never text
Bind Thread	#864737	The only chromatic ink: binding rail, folio numbers, clause numbers. 6.11:1

Bind Thread is a line and a numeral. It is never a fill behind text, never a heading colour, and never a second accent's excuse.

Typography

Font Families

Role	Family	Usage
Display	思源宋体 Semibold, Source Serif 4	Document title and section titles
Body	霞鹜文楷, Source Serif 4	Every paragraph, quote, and table cell
Mono	IBM Plex Mono	Clause numbers, folio tabs, dates, owners, deadlines

Fallbacks: display Noto Sans SC 600, body Noto Sans SC 400, mono Inter 400. 霞鹜文楷 is the body face because long CJK paragraphs are what this deck is made of, and it holds readability at paragraph length better than a screen sans. Write the Latin face first in every fallback chain — matching is per-character, so Han falls through to the CJK face automatically, whereas the reverse order lets the CJK face's own Latin swallow every digit and page number.

Type Scale

Level	Size	Font	Line Height	Usage
Document Title	76	Display	—	Cover page only, once in the whole deck. 76 rather than 72 because the largest size must be >= 2.5x the 30px body
Section Title	44	Display	—	Every interior page
Body	30	Body	1.8	Paragraphs, quotes, question/answer text. The floor
Table Body	28	Body	—	Inside ruled tables only
Clause Number	26	Mono	—	§2.1 markers in the hanging indent
Folio	26	Mono	—	Page tab and document code. Folded up from 24 so the cover runs 76/44/30/26 — four steps, not five

Section title is 44 — the smallest interior title in the system, and that is the point: it is a document's section heading, not a slide's page title. It announces where you are in the file; it does not perform.

Line Height

Body is 1.8, and it goes up rather than down as density rises. This is the counter-intuitive rule of the deck: once line length grows and paragraph count grows, leading is the only variable still holding readability, so it is the last thing to be spent. Titles and mono runs set solid enough to keep the page compact; the paragraph is where the air goes.

Letter Spacing

The document code in the top-left folio position sets uppercase at +2 tracking. Body, titles, and table text take no tracking adjustment — a memo's job is to be transparent.

Layout Grammar

Margins are 96 top, 96 bottom, 216 left, 120 right. The left margin is not a taste decision: it is the space the binding takes. Body copy starts 96px to the right of the binding rail, and the clause numbers hang in the gap to its left. That asymmetry is the strongest identity signal in the deck, and it is also what immunises it against the "every page anchored at the same spot" tell.

The content band is 10 columns × 144 with 9 gutters × 16 = 1584 wide — the gutter is 16 here rather than 24 because that is the only value that divides this band into whole columns. Running text narrows further, to eight of those ten columns, purely to hold line length — the content band is the table's width, not the paragraph's.

Corner radius is 0 everywhere. Zero shadow, zero gradient. Nothing in this deck is a card, so nothing needs a corner.

Signature Motifs

1. Binding rail (binding-rail). A 2px Bind Thread vertical line at x = 120 from the left page edge, running the full page height. Three 12×12 squares filled in Linen and stroked 1px Hairline sit on the line at equal spacing — the binding holes. The rail repeats on every page at exactly the same x, with zero drift.

2. Numbered clause (numbered-clause). The clause number is set in mono at 26 and hangs in the margin to the left of the rail, right-aligned to rail − 24. The clause body starts at rail + 96 and runs as ordinary prose at 30/1.8. There are no bullet glyphs anywhere in the deck — depth is carried entirely by the number (§2 / §2.1 / §2.1.1), and it stops at three levels.

3. Folio tab (folio-tab). Top-right: mono 24 reading p. 3 / 8, with a 48 × 1px Hairline rule directly beneath it. Top-left, at the mirrored position: the document code in mono, uppercase, +2 tracking. Together they tell the reader this is sheet N of a file, which is the whole premise of the deck.

Page Inventory (8 pages)

#	Page	Structure
01	Cover sheet	Document code + title 76 + one abstract paragraph at 30/1.8 (≤5 lines) + three mono lines: recipient, date, classification
02	Background	Section title 44 + clauses §1.1–§1.3, each ≤6 lines
03	Current data	Section title 44 + a ruled table of 6-8 rows + a source line. Data appears as a table; never as a chart
04	Analysis	Section title 44 + clauses §3.1–§3.2 + one Linen Deep quote block
05	Options	Section title 44 + a comparison table (rows = criteria, columns = options); the final row is the recommendation, set bold, with a 2px Bind Thread rule above it
06	Retrospective narrative	Section title 44 + one past-tense "assume this succeeded — here is what it looked like" passage at 30/1.8 (≤8 lines) + a single attributed line, indented italic 30
07	Open questions	Section title 44 + 4-5 question/answer pairs (question mono bold 30; answer 30/1.8, ≤3 lines) separated by 1px Hairline
08	Resolutions	Section title 44 + a Linen Deep decision block holding 3 items, each one sentence at 30 plus a mono owner and a mono deadline + a sign-off slot

Strictly Avoid

1. No bullet glyph, anywhere in the deck. Numbered clauses, whole paragraphs, ruled tables. That is the complete inventory of list forms.
2. No charts. A chart in this deck is a presentation artefact, and this is not a presentation. Data goes into a table.
3. No second chromatic ink. Outside the rust thread, everything is neutral.
4. No radius, shadow, gradient, icon, photograph, or card.
5. No rail drift. The binding rail and the body start sit on the same x on every single page.
6. Clause depth stops at three. A fourth level means the section should be split into its own page or merged upward.
7. Density never touches the type floor. Body 30 is absolute. If it does not fit, remove a clause or add a page — shrinking the body is the failure mode this deck exists to demonstrate you do not need.
8. Folio must be a fraction. p. 3 / 8, never p. 3. A one-sided page number tells an asynchronous reader nothing.
9. No order-dependent phrasing. "As shown on the previous page" is banned; every page must survive being pulled out of the folder alone.
10. Tables use horizontal rules and zebra bands only. No coloured header row, no full box border, no vertical rules.

Anti-Patterns

• Small type standing in for editing. The moment a page is set at 28 to make it fit, the deck has lost the argument it was built to make. Density is a structural result, not a font-size result.
• The rust thread as a highlight colour. Rust behind a heading, rust as an emphasis fill, rust on a keyword — each turns the binding into decoration and immediately reads as a template.
• A card wrapper around a clause. A filled, rounded, shadowed container around body copy converts a memo into a slide. Linen Deep blocks exist for quotes and decisions only, and they carry no radius.
• A symmetric left margin. Setting 120/120 destroys the hanging indent, strands the clause numbers, and removes the one thing that makes these pages look like a bound file.
• Chart-shaped tables. Coloured header bands, alternating column fills, and boxed cells are a chart wearing a table's clothes; keep to rules and bands.