Design system · 10

Four books, bound in cloth.

The studio’s four services are four volumes. They are the one place the site carries real colour and real texture, because they are objects on the desk rather than parts of the screen — and the surface does more of that work than the colour does.

The shelf

Strategy, Design, Build and Scale, always in that order, always as one row: four across on a desktop, a carousel on a phone. Hover a book and it turns toward you.

Strategy

Volume I

Evidence Mapping

Design

Volume II

System Design

Build

Volume III

Platform Build

Scale

Volume IV

Growth Systems

--cover-wear 1.00

Flat dyed board Antique

One dial governs how worn all four look. It ships at 1: a good hardback a few years off the shelf. Past about 1.2 the volumes read as antiques and fight the rest of the page, which is crisp.

The cover

Every cover carries the same four things in the same places: the title in Asar, a single kanji in Klee One as a watermark, the volume number in spaced capitals, and a subtitle. All four are set in one cream, which the dyes are matched in lightness to allow.

The four volumes
Volume	Kanji	Dye
	策	藍 ai — indigo
	匠	藤 fuji — wisteria
	建	青磁 seiji — celadon
	伸	柿 kaki — persimmon

The cloth

The colour token is the dye, not the finished cover: the colour the cloth was before it was bound. Four layers sit over it and turn a flat rectangle into a board that is woven, unevenly dyed, lit from the head and worn at the fore-edge.

Implementation

Cover layers
Layer	Blend	What it does
	multiply	Tiled bookcloth, offset per volume
	soft-light	Soft pooling, so the field is never flat
	soft-light	Light off the desk: the head lifts, the tail falls
	screen	The fore-edge and corners fade

<ChapterBook
  chapter={{ id: "build", title: "Build", subtitle: "Platform Build", href: "/services#build", linkLabel: "Read this chapter" }}
/>

Rules

Stand the four in one row, in order, resting on the paper.
Keep each volume's dye, kanji and number together wherever it appears.
Let the books carry the page's colour; keep everything around them quiet.
Use a warm shadow under them, mixed from ink rather than grey.

Don’t

Arrange them two by two, or set them into recessed wells.
Repeat a cover's title or description beside it.
Use a cover dye anywhere that is not a cover.
Give each book a different amount of wear; they are a matched set.