The system behind the surface.

The Apple system sans stack is the product typeface. It resolves to San Francisco on Apple platforms and the native system sans elsewhere. One token carries prose, navigation, labels, market data, and structural UI.

The dark default reads as warm rather than neutral: every surface tone is shifted a few percent toward yellow. The accent is amber (#E8A62C), tuned to feel structural rather than decorative: used for rules, marks, citations, and live statuses, never as a flat background fill.

The research surface (/research/*) carries a separate sepia paper- reader theme (cream against a warmer-than-white background) so long reads feel like reading paper, not a UI. The light theme is a third skin, available via the header toggle. A fourth hides in the command palette: "Terminal mode", amber phosphor on near-black with CSS scanlines, a wink at the machines this desk descends from (alt-click the theme toggle to leave).

Data-positive and data-negative carry their own tokens (#3DAA6F, #D0524F), separate from the general positive / negative semantic tokens: brighter, more chromatic, so ticker deltas read at a glance.

Motion tokens carry four durations (instant 80ms, fast 160ms, normal 240ms, slow 420ms) and a small set of eases. The standard out-ease (cubic-bezier(0.22, 1, 0.36, 1)) decelerates fast; the spring overshoots subtly. Page transitions crossfade 240ms; the kinetic hero word-reveal runs ~880ms on first paint.

The animation runtime is motion(the successor to framer-motion, swapped in P13). It's tree-shakeable per island; theming transitions apply selectively to the typographic spine (header, main, sections, articles, footers, h1-h4, p) rather than every node, which kept the ticker rail and chart canvas from getting paid the cost of a 240ms transition on every theme change.

The research surfaces use a Tufte-inspired editorial register: sidenotes float into a 280px right gutter on wider viewports; pull quotes appear in two variants (centered with hairline amber rules, or floated to the right column); citations carry a dotted amber underline that opens a 280px popover on hover. Drop caps open methodology bodies; section numerals are roman, dynamically allocated so absent sections don't leave gaps in the numbering.

Each primitive has a defined role: sidenotes for running gloss that accompanies the prose, footnotes for one-off references, hover citations for trader/quant references where the reader might want a one-line gloss. Using the wrong one weakens the voice; the discipline is deliberate.

Every data widget on the site cites its upstream source explicitly. The intent is editorial: readers should be able to verify any number on the page by following the chain back to its issuer.

Authority cascade for the macro-event calendar (the FOMC / CPI / NFP / GDP / PCE markers on every chart): the Federal Reserve's published meeting schedule, the BLS CPI release calendar, the BEA GDP+PCE schedule, and the first-Friday rule for NFP. The dates are curated into a static config: accurate, stable, and independent of any live calendar feed's coverage. Values for the same releases (actual / consensus / prior) join from Finnhub's econ-calendar at runtime.

The site is a Next.js 16 static export served from Cloudflare Pages. Every page is pre-rendered at build time. Anywhere a request needs an API key (quotes, news, filings, the daily brief) a Cloudflare Pages Function intercepts at /api/* with the key held in environment variables. The client never sees a secret.

Pure handlers live in src/server/ with a thin wrapper in functions/api/; the test suite exercises the handlers as plain Request/Response functions without spinning up the Next runtime. Full-text search is powered by Pagefind, indexed at postbuild against any page carrying data-pagefind-body.

Colour and motion were always tokens; the remaining dimensions now are too. Type sizes, letter-spacing, spacing, and corner radii each collapse to a small named ramp in the stylesheet, and a set of shared primitives read from them instead of re-typing literals. The point is restraint: a fixed vocabulary means a value can only land on the scale, so every surface built on the primitives keeps the same rhythm.

The primitives are deliberately few, and each names its job the way the editorial pieces do: a card, a mono kicker label, a tabular number, a labelled stat, a data table, and a toggle pill. The letter-spacing on a desk kicker is now one value (0.14em), not the three that used to drift apart across the markets cards.