Design guide: the principles from the Doors design rounds

LU
6h ago
+93-0

The design rounds settled a set of rules, such as when to use pills, how tags are shown, where citations go and how phones differ. So far they existed only in PR threads. This PR writes them into a short guide, DESIGN.md, so that the next rounds, and anyone else changing a template, can apply them to the rest of the site.

  • The guide builds on the Doors acceptance checklist and cites its IDs. It does not repeat the checklist.
  • It covers ten areas: leading with the task, one main action, calm pages, links, colour, type, shared parts to reuse, phones, words and accessibility. It ends with how to propose a design change: one PR per change, with labelled before-and-after crops.
  • AGENTS.md gets a one-line pointer to it.

No checks were added; the guide points to the existing check_design.py and check_axe.py.

Decisions to review

  • Placed at the repository root, not in scripts/rebrand/, because that folder is deleted after launch.
  • Where today's decisions differ from the checklist, the guide follows the decisions. Tracked capitals are allowed for short schedule labels (MORNING, AFTERNOON), although A9 rules them out elsewhere.
  • Some rules are my reading of several of your decisions rather than one stated rule:
    • pills only for controls;
    • no search on lists under about twenty items;
    • a set of bricks never in near-identical colours;
    • prefer routes into FORRT's own pages.

Created with Claude Opus 5.5 in Claude Code.

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Summary by cubic

Records the design principles settled in the Doors design rounds in DESIGN.md, so they live outside PR threads and can be applied to the rest of the site. AGENTS.md gets a one-line pointer to it. A follow-up commit clarifies that each FORRT cluster keeps one colour of its own across the spectrum.

Decisions to review

  • The guide sits at the repository root, not in scripts/rebrand/, because that folder is deleted after launch.
  • Where decisions differ from the checklist, the guide follows the decisions, such as allowing tracked capitals for short schedule labels despite rule A9.
  • Some rules are readings of several decisions rather than one stated rule: pills only for controls; no search on lists under about twenty items; no sets of bricks in near-identical colours; prefer routes into FORRT's own pages, and a diagram of a section's parts doubles as navigation into those parts.