Every public Downstream artifact.
Graded here against this styleguide itself, not as a generic reference — if a line below is unchecked, it's a real gap in these six pages, not a hypothetical.
as_of 2026-08-10
| Checklist item | This styleguide | |
|---|---|---|
| ● | Displays an as_of date in mono, on the surface, unhidden. | Every stage on every page carries as_of 2026-08-10 in the header, not a tooltip. |
| ● | Every factual claim is citable, and the citation is visible or one click away. | All copy is quoted from design.md, cited by section throughout (e.g. "design.md §3"). |
| ● | Uses status hue only for status, with a mono token or shape alongside it. | Every chip pairs color with the OBSERVED/PENDING/MISSED/SILENT/STRUCK token and a shape glyph. §02, §06. |
| ● | Contains no self-reported confidence, no percentage-certain meter, no "AI" chrome. | No confidence bars anywhere. The one probabilistic chart (§06) shows a distribution against ground truth, not a certainty meter. |
| ● | Makes no recommendation. | These pages describe the system; they state no exposure, no buy/sell, no "you should." |
| ● | Closes with a caveat line in the same weight as the rest of the page. | Every page ends with a .footer-caveat — same type scale as body caption, not smaller. |
| ○ | Passes AA at every text size, verified — not assumed. | Every color pairing here is a token lifted directly from design.md's own ratio table (§02), which states its ratios. This page has not re-run an independent contrast audit against the rendered DOM — that's a real gap, marked pending rather than checked. |
| ● | Reads correctly in grayscale. | See the grayscale chip demonstration on §02 — status is still legible by token and glyph with hue removed. |
| ● | Renders with the fallback font stack, no network fonts required. | No @font-face, no font CDN, anywhere in tokens.css. Demonstrated explicitly on §03. |
"If an artifact fails the first or the fifth, it doesn't ship. Those two aren't style." Both are checked above.
Open design questions
Same convention as the founding memo — written down while they're still cheap to get right. Carried over from design.md §8, unanswered here on purpose.
- Does the mark need to be a mark at all? Moody's, MSCI, and ICE are wordmarks. A symbol is a bet that Downstream becomes ambient enough to be recognized without its name.
- How much does the .sh surface diverge? A genuinely mono, terminal-register developer site is a strong signal to exactly the audience that maintains Layer 1 adapters. It's also a maintenance surface.
- Does the Ledger get its own visual identity? Argument for: it's a public utility that should look institution-neutral. Argument against: the track record is Downstream's asset and detaching it dilutes the thing it exists to prove.
- What does a wrong forecast look like? Getting this right visually is worth more than any other single decision in the system. If a resolved-wrong Ledger entry is even slightly quieter than a resolved-right one, the whole trust argument leaks.
- Trademark. The memo flags it: check "Downstream" before anyone gets attached to a mark.