Three voices, mapped 1:1 to what the product knows.
Serif carries the argument. Sans carries the interface. Mono carries the machine-checkable — and that third rule is the signature. If a string could be verified by a machine against a primary source, it is set in mono.
The mono rule, demonstrated
us/119-hr-1-enr/divB/titVII/sec71101/a/2
snap/2026-07-30
P(vacated | challenged)
"The Fifth Circuit vacated the rule" is not mono — that's prose.
Over time this trains a reader to see, at a glance, which parts of a page are checkable. No competitor in the category is doing anything like it, and it costs nothing.
Scale
A 1.25 modular scale off a 16px base, small end tuned for table density. Every specimen below is set at its real size — this is not a mockup of the scale, it is the scale.
Display — 62/1.0, serif 700 · wordmark, cover only
Downstream tells you what a law actually does.
H1 — 44/1.14, -0.01em, serif 700 · max 20ch, one claim per headline
The data is public. The data is not the moat.
H2 — 21/1.25, serif 700
Point-in-time discipline
H3 — 18/1.3, serif 700 · card titles
A frontier model plus our open corpus does 70% of this. The last 30% is where the value is.
Lede — 15.5/1.55, sans · max 96ch
Downstream states exposures, distributions, catalysts, and falsifiers. It never says buy, sell, you should, the right move is.
Body — 14/1.55, sans · --text-body
obligated ÷ authorized at 24 months
Dense / table — 13.5/1.5, sans · table cells, list items
This page is generated from design.md; if the two disagree, design.md is current.
Caption — 12/1.5, sans italic · footers, honest caveats
42 U.S.C. § 1395x · as_of 2026-08-10
Citation — 12/1.6, mono · identifiers, dates, queries
Eyebrow — 11/1, .18em caps, mono, ochre · one per surface, top-left
Chip — 10/1, .12em caps, mono · status tokens
Two typographic details worth protecting
The square bullet
List items lead with a small ochre square rather than a disc — deliberately the one mark in the system that carries no meaning beyond list item. Not §, not a dash, dot, or diamond: those are spoken for.
- Mono for anything machine-verifiable
- Hue reserved for epistemic status
- No decorative confidence
Tabular figures
font-feature-settings: "tnum" 1, "ss01" 1 is enabled globally. A base rate, an n, a Brier score, and a date align down the column without a table forcing them to:
| Mechanism | n | Base rate |
|---|---|---|
| Delegation | 118 | 0.62 |
| Preemption | 14 | 0.09 |
| Definitional amendment | 1,204 | 0.31 |
Faces, and why
Source Serif 4 holds a 44px headline without reading as a law review. Inter is neutral, exceptional at 12–14px, with real tabular figures. JetBrains Mono has a tall x-height and unambiguous 0/O and 1/l/I — it matters when the string is a citation someone will retype. All three are SIL OFL.