What improves
Hierarchy, cross-media coherence, diagrams, operational legibility
Inter and Plex Mono behave consistently across web, document, and film. The same semantic fields and token set can travel.
11 / Reference
Agents &
Adoption.
The same versioned contract serves people and agents: inspect the canon, adopt the assets, validate the result, then preserve the evidence.
- Status
- Canonical · 2.0.0
- CLI
- ontology check
- Agent
- Skill + read-only MCP
- Authority
- design-system.json
11.1 / Adoption contract
Inspect, install, implement, validate.
Agents never infer the current house style from screenshots or memory. They read the manifest and skill, consume the local assets, and run the shared checker before handoff.
What changes
Less literary warmth, more structural severity
Playfair, Newsreader, cream, and amber recede. Personal warmth must come from writing, subject, imagery, and material—not a default serif.
11.2 / Migration map
Preserve identity. Adopt system. Retire drift.
Each decision names what moved and why. Provenance is explicit; the canonical boundary is now settled.
01
Ontology name
Keep the personal system’s name and role as Clark’s canonical design language.
Preserve02
BS"D
Retain as a quiet authorship and worldview marker in personal system surfaces.
Preserve03
Inter role hierarchy
Use 900 for rare monuments, 500 for display and claims, 400 for headlines and body, and 300 only for oversized ledes.
Adopt04
IBM Plex Mono
Use for labels, indices, technical state, ledgers, dates, and specifications.
Adopt05
Black / white / silver
Replace the warm paper/carbon pair as the canonical foundation.
Adopt06
Signal Green
Replace amber as the single semantic accent across current and verified state.
Adopt07
Briefing Paper
Keep #F7F7F4 as an editorial application field, not the global canvas.
Adapt08
Claim + proof composition
Use asymmetric editorial statements beside semantic diagrams, ledgers, or source visuals.
Adopt09
Recipient briefing anatomy
Keep it inside briefing products; do not make every website follow its linear sequence.
Bounded10
Transformative wordmark
Remain outside the personal system. Rules transfer; corporate identity does not.
Exclude11
Playfair / Newsreader / amber
Retire from the canonical personal system; preserve only in legacy or explicitly literary artifacts.
Retire12
Soft cards and dashboard chrome
Remove where present. Prefer fields, rows, rules, and negative space.
Retire11.3 / Verification gates
The standard must keep proving itself in real artifacts.
Canonical status is a responsibility, not an exemption from review. Every application must show that the system improves the actual work.
- 01
Personal writing surface
Rebuild one essay or note where warmth matters and confirm the sans-serif system still feels personal.
- 02
Operational document
Apply it to a real decision memo or working packet and test whether the claim/proof grammar improves comprehension.
- 03
Private briefing
Use the exact current packet system and inspect desktop/mobile reading, gate boundary, and embedded film.
- 04
Narrated film
Produce one new film from the shared token set and verify semantic visual quality at player scale.
- 05
Agent implementation
Give the machine-readable contract to a new agent and see whether it reproduces the system without visual coaching.
11.4 / Profile boundary
One default, one explicit literary lane.
Ontology 2.0 is the default for strategic, technical, product, briefing, and film work. The literary profile can retain a serif reading voice when sustained reading is itself the product—without splitting the system.
Default lane
Structural
Inter, Plex Mono, black/white/silver, semantic green, claim/proof composition.
Editorial adaptation
Reading
Briefing Paper, wider leading, centered thesis mast, flush-left modules, dark system fields.
Explicit exception
Literary
A named serif mode for essays, ritual, memory, or intimate material—never an accidental fallback.
Ontology 2.0 is canonical. The literary profile is a bounded exception, not a second default. Changes to either boundary require an explicit versioned decision.