Rough it out.
One system, every component.

The base lockup (.ds-brand, no modifier). The mark the site actually wears: the 40px bitmap logo and the full name, set at --ds-text-md bold with a touch of tracking. It is the only lockup whose glyph is an image rather than type, so on ink it cannot recolour through a token — it inverts, exactly as the scrolled band inverts it. The name is an unclassed span, which is why the dark rule has to come from the surface rather than from the element.

The monogram (.ds-brand--monogram). Initials in the signature 2px box, name alongside — the smallest lockup that still says both things. The box stays an outline on either surface and only its stroke colour moves, so the mark never turns into a different shape in the dark; hover fills it periwinkle, the one move it borrows from the button. Square corners: it is a surface, not a control.

The plate (.ds-brand--plate). The postmark: the name over a mono role kicker in a drawn 2px frame — the one place the brand is allowed two lines. It used to be a filled slab, which made it the only lockup that inverted against its surface rather than with it. It no longer does: the frame stays an outline on both surfaces and only its stroke colour moves, exactly as the monogram's box does, so the lockup never becomes a different shape in the dark. That costs one token (--ds-brand-plate-edge) and buys back a whole category of surprise.

The frame is a pseudo-element, not a border on the box, and that is not a flourish: a real border occupies layout, so it could not be absent from a folded plate without shifting every row by 2px. Being a pseudo lets it be drawn — which is the last beat of the fold below. The three rows are three elements, each leading with a .ds-brand__seed: the glyph of the dot mark that row grew from.

The dot (.ds-brand--dot). Lowercase mono initials closed by a full stop — the compact mark, for the places a full name will not fit. The stop is the only place the accent is spent, and it is the only thing that moves in the dark: periwinkle on paper, violet on ink, where the stronger tone would vibrate. --ds-brand-dot-size carries the same mark from this header scale to the 3rem loader splash without a second rule. It reads as initials, not a word, so the link carries the name in its aria-label.

Plate to dot, and back (.ds-brand-fold). The last two lockups are not two marks — the plate is the dot, unfolded. Each of the plate's three rows carries the glyph it grew from, so folding does not swap one lockup for another, it stands the same three glyphs back down into a row. That is what lets a column narrow to 84px without the identity at the top of it blinking into something else.

Four beats, in order: kc. stands up from a row into a column and shrinks to the plate's own size as it goes; the frame is drawn round the column it now encloses; each glyph hands off; each word writes out, one row after another. The glyph is gone before its word arrives — lowercase mono cannot be interpolated into bold sans, and two typefaces caught overlapping read as a glitch rather than as a handoff.

A fold only means anything at two widths, so each frame below is a column that narrows, built from the rail's own tokens. Hover one, or tab into it. On the live rail the same two states are the collapse and the breather. Both surfaces, as everywhere else on this page — and nothing in the pair is restated for the dark one. The frame, the glyphs and the kicker all read the plate's own tokens, so the fold inverts by standing on a different surface rather than by being told to.

The whole governed set at 20px — the size the rail renders, which is the only size the review test is run at. The two panels are the same twenty <partial> calls; the ink one declares a colour and changes nothing else.

The band. Sticky at the top of every page, closed by the 2px underline. Brand left, nav right; the links are uppercase and tracked out, and the accent underline (background-size, not a border, so it wipes rather than appears) fills on hover and stays filled on .is-active — Blog is held open here.

Scrolled. Past 60px (headerScroll in the behaviour layer) the band fills with --ds-surface-dark, the logo inverts and the links go pale. The solid CV button would read black-on-black, so it flips to periwinkle — the same move the mobile menu makes.

The floating alternative (.ds-header--floating). The band turns transparent and stops taking clicks; the inner row becomes the surface — a card inset from all three edges, carrying the 2px border and the --ds-shadow-pop lift. Square corners: it is a surface, not a control. The band stays sticky and in flow, so the card holds its 16px gap at every scroll position and nothing beneath it shifts — the page reserves the same --ds-header-height as the band does, and every anchor offset on the site keeps working untouched.

Floating, scrolled. The card darkens instead of the band. Ink-on-ink would swallow the shadow, so the lift switches to the periwinkle --ds-shadow-pop-soft; every other flip — brand, links, button — is inherited from the shared is-scrolled rules, not restated.

Try it on a real page. A layout picks its skin with ViewData["DsChrome"]; this page exposes that as a switch, so the chrome at the top of your screen changes rather than one in a box. Scroll after switching to see the dark state arrive. Rail is the third skin and the only one that is a different partial rather than a modifier — the two levels it carries have no counterpart in a single row of links, so it swaps _SiteHeader for _SiteRail and the page composes against a --ds-rail-width margin instead of a header height. Pick it and this page grows a spine listing every registered style. Its own section is below.

And the mark it opens with. The brand is a parameter of the chrome, not a constant inside it: whichever skin is showing renders _BrandMark, so the four lockups from the brand section are all reachable from here and none of them can drift from what that section documents. The band ships the bitmap mark and the rail defaults to the monogram — a 264px column has room for the initials box and a wrapped name, which a one-line bitmap lockup does not use as well. Try the plate on the rail: it is the lockup that was drawn for a corner.

The toggle. Hidden until 768px, where the nav becomes a full-height menu with mono numbering down its rows. The bars are three spans and the cross is a transform off aria-expanded — the attribute a screen reader needs is the one that draws the state, so the two cannot disagree. Both states are shown here; on a phone it is one button.

Before the header, the skip link. .ds-skip-link is the first thing in the body and sits 100px above the viewport until it takes focus, then drops into the top-left corner and jumps to #ds-main. Press Tab from the address bar on any page to see it — it is not framed here because it only exists in relation to the top of the window.

The rail. The header turned through ninety degrees: chrome leaves the top edge for the left margin, and in the room that buys it grows the second level of navigation the band never had space for. Brand, then the three apps as one bordered plate divided by the 2px rule, then that rule turned inward into a timeline carrying the current app’s sections, then the CV button on the floor. Primary wears the ink, secondary wears the accent — the current app is a filled plate, a place you are; the current section is a periwinkle marker, a position that moves. Two levels, two colours, and no way to confuse them.

Switch app, and the spine re-populates. The geometry never moves — only the label and the rows under it. In the Portfolio the spine reads slides and lists the deck’s panels; in the Blog it reads sections and lists the four surfaces of the archive. Both come from one ISiteNavigation, so a destination cannot exist in the rail and nowhere else.

The shortest spine on the site. This page’s own second level is not its forty-one sections — those are a table of contents for one page, and they stay in the drawer. It is which skin you are reading in: Classic or Flow. Two rows, and the spine still reads as the same component, because a level that can be short without looking broken is a level that can be honest about how much is under it.

Collapsed, and the breather. Hover the rail below. The latch parks it at one cell wide; from there hover or keyboard focus opens the full column over the page rather than pushing it, on the pop shadow that anything floating free of an edge earns. The page’s margin follows the resting width and never the hovered one, so content holds still while the column passes across it — the reason to overlay rather than reflow is that a reader glancing at the nav should not lose their place in the text. Closing carries a --ds-rail-close-delay so a cursor travelling diagonally back to the page does not snap the column shut as it clips the corner; opening has none.

Nothing moves when the rail breathes. Every row is a --ds-rail-cell square plus a label that fades, and the horizontal padding is identical in both states, so the collapsed width is derived — cell plus two paddings — rather than picked. The cell therefore lands on the same pixel either way: collapsing changes what is written beside a row, never where the row is. That is what stops it reading as two components swapping. The same discipline decides the marks: the plate is the lockup drawn for a corner and tops the open column, but 84-odd pixels have room for initials and nothing else, so collapsed always falls back to the dot — and it is swapped by display, not opacity, so only one of the two is ever in the accessibility tree. The icons are load-bearing here, not decoration: collapsed, the cell is the entire row, and a mono number that read fine beside a word does not survive being the only thing left. They follow their own style guide (docs/guidelines/icon-style-guide.md) — 24px canvas, 2.4 stroke, square caps, no curves, because a set that drifts in weight stops reading as one row.

Below 992px, a band and a full-page menu. A phone cannot spare a permanent 264px column, so the rail hands the page its width back and keeps only a band — the mark and the toggle, in both states. What the toggle opens is the page: a 264px drawer is a shape borrowed from the column it came from, and at this width the column is not the point. The map gets the screen, carrying the same two levels in the same order — order kept intact rather than two levels reflowed into one flat menu is the whole reason the component exists. There is no scrim, because a full-page panel has no outside to dim; the toggle stays put above it and becomes the way out. 992px is deliberate: it is the same threshold the deck disengages at, so the Portfolio never has a rail without slides to track. Shown here at desktop width, declared open rather than tapped open.

Two class choices carry the component. The panel is .ds-rail__nav, not .ds-nav: the phone overlay restyles every .ds-nav descendant into the full-screen ink menu — down to a counter on ::before, which is precisely where the spine draws its marker — and that block sorts after this one, so taking a different class is cheaper and steadier than out-specifying it. The section links, though, keep .ds-nav__link, because that is the hook the deck reads: any such link whose fragment names a panel is already wired to page the deck and to receive .is-active as it moves. The spine gets slide tracking for nothing, and pays only by overriding the underline wipe it would otherwise inherit.

Anatomy. A top rule and one row: copyright left in muted tracked-out caps, onward links right. The row wraps rather than shrinks, so on a phone the links drop under the copyright instead of crowding it. Social icons are inline SVG on currentColor, lifting 2px to the accent on hover.

Under Sketch, drawn freehand. The same band, but the top rule bows with the elliptical radii every long stroke in the notebook carries, and the copyright line sits a fraction of a degree off level. The colours still arrive through the tokens, so a palette re-inks this footer without the style knowing. Switch to Classic in the hero to see the ruled version.

Brand only. Both partials take ShowNav = false, which drops the nav from the header and the links from the footer. That is the maintenance splash: the same chrome with nowhere to go, on a page that loads no JS to open a menu with.

The command line — the default. The whole state as a single shell invocation: the prompt, a cd into the page, and a live --section flag that rewrites itself as you scroll, the caret still blinking at the end. The right side carries the section counter and the percentage; the progress bar is the 2px accent rule filling along the strip’s bottom edge — present, never competing with the text. Scroll inside the frame.

The ASCII meter — the same strip with the progress drawn in block glyphs instead of a rule: ████░░░░░░, ten characters filling in periwinkle beside the percentage. No track element, no div — the meter is text, which is exactly the joke and exactly the credibility. A strip carries the meter or the fill, never both; two progress readings a rounding error apart read as a bug.

The readouts, composed — the right side is three optional spans, and a page keeps only what it needs: the section counter alone for a piece where the count is the point, the percentage for a long single read, and one of the two bars where the glance should not need numbers at all. Held at sixty-two percent so the four can be compared.

A page opts in by putting a ProgressStrip in ViewData["DsProgress"]; the layout renders it at the top of main through _ProgressStrip, pinned under the page’s chrome — or fixed over the deck, which has no scroll to pin in. The strip exposes role="progressbar" with aria-valuenow and a spoken aria-valuetext (“section 2 of 5, 34% read”); the meter glyphs and the caret are decoration and say so. Under prefers-reduced-motion the caret holds solid instead of blinking — still live, no longer motion. Below 768px the path drops from the command whole, then the prompt folds to kc:~$ — the constant and the answer survive, the piece already committed to goes first. The whole strip stays one line, under 30px, so it can never become a second header.