brand kit
The Raven's Ledger, Major Textiles Project folio, HSC Textiles and Design. This is the specification of record
for the folio's identity: names, colours, type and the masthead construction. The implementation is
design-system/deck.css, whose comments record the measurements behind each choice, and the full Colour chapter is in
design-system/meta/design-process.html, built by preview.ps1 -Item meta. The reasons are in design-rationale.md.
Every picture on this page is a live specimen from the design notes page, drawn by deck.css and rendered when
the wiki is published, so the pictures and the pages cannot disagree.
Section names follow NESA's Major Textiles Project marking guidelines exactly (see nesa-marking-facts.md, section 1). Two rulings:
- "Design Inspiration" is singular.
- "Investigation, Experimentation and Evaluation" uses "and", never "&". The ampersand is reserved for period titles, which are the folio's own naming and not NESA-facing.
| Pages | NESA section (official) | Period title (masthead) | Area colourway |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 to 2 | Design Inspiration | The Sources, Gathered | Slate |
| 3 to 5 | Visual Design Development | The Designs, Weighed | Bone |
| 6 to 8 | Manufacturing Specification | The Making | Ash |
| 9 to 12 | Investigation, Experimentation and Evaluation | Trials & Proofs | Wine |
The full official name is used verbatim in the dateline on all twelve pages. The section name a marker looks for is never paraphrased, and never only in the footer.
The masthead of each section, drawn at 297 mm and shown at 60 per cent.
Four structural tokens: Ink #1A1A1A, Paper #FEFBFC, Cream #F5EFE2 (the masthead band), and the two brand
colours sampled from the garment, which arrive as props: slate #4A4E69 (the rule under the wordmark) and
wine #8C3B4A (the NESA-designated second colour for pattern modifications on page 7). A fifth token,
school purple #5B2A86 (Wednesday's Nevermore uniform), colours the house mark, the masthead hem, the
running foot's stitch row and the stitch rows the mark sits between, and nothing else.
Each folio chapter (area) carries its own colourway of five tokens:
- field: pale panel fill; the masthead chapter-transition block
- border: full-strength token for rules, borders and accents; table header-row fills
- accent: deeper tone for fine detail; plate corner dots
- tint: near-white wash; table cell fills and large backgrounds
- emph: the accent taken down to text contrast; coloured type only
| Area | field | border | accent | tint | emph | emph on paper |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| I Slate | #C8C9D6 |
#7C7F9E |
#6A6D86 |
#EFF0F3 |
#5A5C70 |
6.38 : 1 |
| II Bone | #DAD2C7 |
#A6957A |
#8D7F69 |
#F4F2EF |
#766B59 |
5.08 : 1 |
| III Ash | #C9D4DA |
#7F98A8 |
#6D818E |
#F0F3F5 |
#5C6C77 |
5.28 : 1 |
| IV Wine | #D8C1C6 |
#A26B78 |
#8A5C67 |
#F4EDEF |
#744F58 |
6.80 : 1 |
The four colourways, filled from the same --area-* tokens the pages use.
Field, accent and tint are derived from the border: field is the border mixed 42 per cent over white, tint 12 per
cent over white, accent the border mixed 82 per cent towards ink. emph is the accent mixed 80 per cent towards
ink, color-mix(in srgb, <accent> 80%, #1A1A1A), written out as a literal so it survives without color-mix()
and so a marker's contrast check lands on a number in the file. If a border is re-sampled, re-derive all four and
re-measure emph; every value must stay above 4.5 : 1 on paper.
Contrast rules. Area tokens are fill-and-rule colours, never text colours. Text over a fill is always Ink,
and only ever over field or tint. Border may sit behind table header text. emph is the only token that may
colour type, and its one use is the last clause of the closing statement on page 12.
The one text use of an area colour: Wine emph, 16 pt, 6.80 : 1 on paper.
Component mapping. Per page, the area class recolours exactly these components and nothing else: the masthead chapter-transition block (field), table header rows (border), table cells (tint), plate corner dots (accent), and the section-title stub rules on pages 5 and 12 (border). Kept in brand colours, not area colours: the slate rule under the wordmark, the house mark and its divider lines (school purple), and the wine that marks pattern modifications on pages 6 to 8. Production drawings and pattern pieces stay pure ink linework.
Two families. Fraunces Black (opsz 9 to 144, weight 900) is the display face, used only in the wordmark, section titles and the plate-number roundels. PT Serif is the text face for everything a marker reads. Body 12.5 pt at 1.3 leading; tables, captions, keys, drawing labels and the running foot 12 pt; the standfirst and closing statement 16 pt at 1.4. The kit has no style below 12 pt. The swing tag reverse reproduced on page 7 is artwork at 1 : 1 and is the only place smaller type appears.
Fraunces Black: the wordmark at 38 pt, a section title at 19 pt, and the plate-number roundels.
PT Serif: the standfirst at 16 pt, body at 12.5 pt, and the dateline at 12 pt.
One ornament for the whole set: a simplified nightshade flower drawn as linework, held in design-system/assets/house-mark.svg,
in school purple #5B2A86. It carries no lines of its own; the stitch rows either side of it are CSS rules in the
same purple, so they always sit on the page's own line axis. It appears in the running foot on all twelve pages, in the ornamented rule that closes the opening and
closing statements, on the binder spine and on the swing tag, and nowhere else. It is sized by its ink, not its
file: --mark-h is the height of the drawn flower and the box is scaled to deliver it (see .mark-band in
deck.css).
The mark at 10 mm in the ornamented rule, and at 6 mm in the running foot.
The cream band carries the wordmark at 38 pt with the slate rule beneath, and ends after the wordmark in a 60 degree clipped edge. The area field block, fixed at 122 mm wide, begins on that same edge and carries the right-aligned dateline in two registers: the official NESA section name in PT Serif bold caps, 12 pt, 0.11 em letterspacing, over the period title in PT Serif italic, 12 pt. The block is top-aligned so the section name starts at the same height on every page and a two-line name grows downward. Line breaks are authored, never wrapped: only "Investigation, Experimentation / and Evaluation" breaks.
The right-hand 180 mm of the masthead at full size: the seam, the dateline, and the hem below.
Slant geometry: horizontal run = band height / tan 60 degrees, about 0.577 times the band height, 15 mm at the default 26 mm band. The slant is derived from the band height so the angle holds if the band is retuned within 22 to 28 mm.
The area block width is constrained at both ends. Measured on the A3 page at the specified sizes with the previous twenty character wordmark:
- Upper bound: page minus cream padding-left minus wordmark width. At 38 pt the old wordmark measured 143.3 mm, giving 297.1 - 25 - 143.3 = 128.8 mm. Above this the wordmark is clipped by the 60 degree edge.
- Lower bound: widest dateline line plus the 60 degree edge at that line plus right padding, 87.2 + 12.4 + 15 = 114.6 mm. Below this the longest section name collides with the slant.
122 mm sits inside that window. The Raven's Ledger is two characters shorter than the wordmark those figures
were measured with, so the upper bound has moved out, not in, and 122 mm still clears. Re-measure the wordmark
width in the preview before shipping any change to the wordmark, its size, the dateline wording, the 25 mm
binding margin, or the display face, and update the figures here and in deck.css.
Implementation hazard. The area block is positioned by margin-left: calc(-1 * var(--m2-slant)). CSS
calc() cannot add or subtract a unitless number from a length, so any custom property in that expression must
always carry a unit. A bare 0 invalidates the declaration, the negative margin is dropped, and the two 60 degree
edges spring apart by the full slant.
The rule under the masthead is a hem: a 0.53 mm folded edge over a row of topstitching 1.4 mm below it, full
width, in school purple. The stitch is 2.5 mm of 0.35 mm thread with round ends and a 1 mm gap, one SVG tile
repeated with background-repeat: round so every row starts and ends on a whole stitch. The same stitch row,
alone, rules the running foot and sits either side of the house mark. The edge is 0.53 mm rather than 0.4 mm
because 0.4 mm is 1.51 px on a 1x screen and snapped to one row on half the pages, collapsing the old pair to a
doubled hairline; the stitch reads by its length, not its weight, and is exempt. Plates on pages 1 to 5 carry a 0.4 mm outer frame, a 0.12 mm inner frame 1.8 mm
inside it, and four 1.6 mm corner dots in the area accent. Drawings on pages 6 to 8 sit in a 0.3 mm single box
with no dots.
A source plate, a sketch plate, and a production drawing, at the size they print.
The stub rule is 60 mm by 1.1 mm in the area border colour, under the opening display line on pages 5 and 12.
These override every aesthetic rule above.
- Nothing below 12 pt on a folio page.
- No student name anywhere. Student number only, in the running foot.
- Twelve A3 pages, one side, in NESA order, with the section page limits met.
- Production drawings and pattern pieces in ink line only, with the designated second colour for modifications.
- Every image numbered and cited; no copyrighted still reproduced without a licence.