ADR-0098 Instrument indoors, signal outside, and the palette it sets

#Context

The system had rules and no look. A direction pass (design/direction-pass-1/) drew three candidates on the same three surfaces: an oversight console, a company website and an outside device. Instrument (A) was engineered and quiet, Luminous (B) was named for the stars, and Signal (C) was safety signage. The maintainer chose A and C together, approved the combined foundations and components sheet, and left three details to the author: the interior demand stays a strip with a hot rule, condensed display caps are for page titles indoors and section headings in the field, and hard offset shadows are for overlays only.

#Decision

One system, two voices, chosen by theme family. Interior themes (SaaS, enterprise, websites) speak as an instrument: hairlines, quiet ink, attention as brightness. Field themes (outside devices, day and night) speak as signage: heavy rules, big targets, attention as fill. All four share the ladder, shape as state, one hot hue reserved for the demand, ultramarine for marked, square corners, and Big Shoulders Display for titles. The typeface swap per family already exists (ADR-0023), so the voices are values, not machinery.

This record sets the palette. Typefaces, corners, shadows and component treatments follow in their own units.

• Ramps: accent moves from hue 250 to 268 (ultramarine) with chroma scale

1.5. Critical moves from hue 25 to 37 (a hot orange) with chroma scale 1.4. Neutral takes hue 258 and chroma scale 0.09, a graphite tint.

• Grounds: interior-light's substrate is L 0.97, interior-dark's L 0.17.

Interior-dark's lightness curve becomes near-linear, with its top steepened so secondary text holds Lc 90 on the raised surface.

• Directed is ink. In every theme emitter-directed binds to the neutral

extreme: near-black indoors in light, white-hot in the dark, black in field day. Attention above marked is brightness and weight, not a second hue.

• Demanded is the orange:

What the checks forced, and where the design gave way:

• ADR-0039 refuses two ladder rungs at one lightness. The status roles

moved to share a step with marked, the same level, in both interior themes.

• Field day's contrast floors decide its order. Its lightest step is 0.96,

so ambient can be no lighter than 0.62. Demanded therefore sits at 0.51, a deep safety red-orange, rather than the brighter #FF4F00 the sheet showed. Field day's inset ground becomes the white step. The floors are sunlight legibility, and they win.

• Interior dark's inset ground now shares the raised step. A lighter inset

pushed the empty-state scene over its ceiling, because an empty state is a large block on that ground.

• The site's top links and Display labels take primary text. They sit on

the raised surface, where the site holds text to Lc 90.

The emission ceilings are re-derived from the new ramps (ADR-0030). Interior-light moves from 0.151339 to 0.128775, interior-dark from 0.152920 to 0.160004, field-day from 0.143198 to 0.142949, and field-night from 0.128641 to 0.128712. The ladder rungs are re-derived with them. No scene's declared verdict changed in either set. Every value moved, and both baselines are re-recorded on both platforms.

#Consequences

• Every component and page takes the new colour through the semantic tier,

with no component edit.

• The themed 03-violations check now requires scope salience only. It

required an emission failure too, on ADR-0011's reasoning that a ceiling derived to admit one demand must be exceeded by several. ADR-0030 had already replaced that ceiling with one derived from the ramps. Under this palette the demand is no longer the loudest lightness, so the scene fails emission only in field night. The scene exists for the salience failure, and all four themed variants still produce it.

• The field-day demand is darker than the approved sheet. Getting the sheet's

brighter orange would take an ADR to lower the field-day floors, which this record does not do.

• Next units: type families and scales (Chivo, Chivo Mono, Atkinson

Hyperlegible Next and Mono, Big Shoulders Display), which need font files added to the repository; square corners, which supersede ADR-0045's turned corners; hard offset shadows on overlays; and the component and site treatments from the sheet.

#Rejected

• Luminous (B). It is the most ownable brand, but its glow spends

emission, and a dense enterprise screen would need a stricter sub-theme.

• Hand-picked hex values. Every colour here is generated: the ramps and

bindings changed, and the floors and ceilings were re-checked, not assumed.

• Lowering the field-day floors to keep the brighter orange. It trades

sunlight legibility for a swatch.