The spine, the footer line, and four motifs — nothing else.
Drawn from what the product actually is. Use them; don't invent a fifth.
Grid and structure
Dark cover → light content → dark close. This exact page follows the rhythm: the section above is light content, the section below closes dark.
- Cards: #FFFFFF on --paper, 1px --rule, 10px radius, 0 1px 2px rgba(16,32,64,.04). Shadows are for separation only — never for elevation drama.
- The spine. The left rail on this page is the spine motif, generalized: mono nav, current item in ochre with a 2px left border. This document happens to be a Downstream artifact, so it uses one.
- The footer line. Every dense surface closes with a hairline rule and one italic caption stating the caveat. Structurally, not occasionally.
The info flyout
The one component in the system that hides anything, and it may hide exactly one class of thing: method — the rule that produced a number, which a reader needs once and then never again. Set as a paragraph, a classification rule outweighs the chart it explains; on a phone it pushes the chart off the screen. Live implementation: daily/lib/flyout.mjs.
Documents by part of the executive
The rule that produced this chart
The Federal Register is an executive-branch publication — Congress and the courts do not publish here — so a chart of the three branches would be a chart with one bar. This splits the executive instead.
Open it. The control is a native <details> — keyboard, screen reader and no-JS behaviour are free; script adds only Escape, outside click, and one open at a time.
- The glyph, and nothing else, at the end of the heading. It carried the word
methodbeside it, which made a pill wide enough to need its own line under the heading — a second thing to read before reaching the section, for a word the panel's own title says better. The heading rendersdisplay:inlineso the glyph lands after its last word however the heading wraps. - 34px of target around a 22px ring. The ring is all that shows; the padding is what a thumb hits. The name lives in
aria-labeland the tooltip. - Ochre only when it is open.
--quietat rest, accent on hover, focus and open — so an open flyout is the one lit thing on the surface. - In flow on a phone, floating from 700px up. A panel that floats on a 360px screen covers the chart it is explaining.
- Never behind it: an
as_of, a citation, a count, a provenance hash, or a caveat about coverage. Stating a blind spot only when asked is not stating it unprompted — see design.md §1, constraint 2.
The four motifs
statute → rulemaking → comment → litigation → obligation → enforcement
Six links, first solid and the rest outlined. Shown in full on §01 Overview.
One source branching into many downstream channels
Branching = cross-reference blast radius. Converging = the linkage layer. Both are true, and they're the two halves of the name.
A staff gauge in water — measurement against a moving level
The scorekeeper motif — a fixed measure, a level that moves.
A horizontal rule accumulating tick marks — filled where resolved, hollow where pending
Append-only, made visible. The missed entry (§03 missed, in red-adjacent oxide) sits in the same line, same size, as the resolved ones — nothing about it is quieter.
Not motifs
Every one of these is either partisan-coded, category-generic, or claims intelligence Downstream has specifically declined to claim:
capitol domes · gavels · scales of justice · eagles · flags · ballot boxes · columns · red-white-and-blue · neural networks · glowing brains · circuit-board traces · robot anything