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Impeccable — project design configuration

Design Context

Users

Historians and political scientists doing comparative research across francophone West African press archives. They arrive with specific questions, run faceted / full-text searches over 14,000+ items, read OCR'd articles, and follow entity indexes and computational dashboards (sentiment, topics, networks). Multilingual: FR primary, EN secondary, Arabic transliteration everywhere (ḥ ṣ ḍ ṭ ẓ ʿ ā ī ū must render in every face used).

Brand Personality

Documentary, rigorous, confident. A research instrument with a face — the visual language of the 20th-century West African press it preserves (mastheads, column rules, datelines, agate labels) executed with contemporary product polish (Linear/Stripe-press tier). Never museum-brochure warm, never generic-dashboard cold.

Aesthetic Direction — "Press Archive"

  • Type: Besley (Clarendon; masthead, headlines, display numerals) + Source Serif 4 (long-form reading, ledes) + Public Sans (UI). Verified: Besley covers Latin Extended Additional (transliteration-safe).
  • Structure from rules, not boxes: newspaper rule grammar — thick-thin double rules for the masthead/footer, 2px ink rules above section heads, hairlines between ledger rows. Cards only for true panels (charts, KPIs).
  • Datelines: uppercase letterspaced sans eyebrows (ARTICLE DE PRESSE · FRATERNITÉ MATIN · 20 DÉCEMBRE 2017) as the recurring identity device.
  • Color: OKLCH system retained. Light = near-white, crisp ink rules, orange redeployed (masthead rule, current-state, counts — never per-card badges). Dark = warm lamplit reading-room (hue ~70, chroma ~0.012), not blue-black.
  • Hero: primary-duotone treatment of the press-collage banner (homepage only; inner pages drop the banner strip entirely).
  • Density: ledger-style flat result rows, inline metadata values, compact page headers. Researchers see more per screen.

Anti-references

Warm cream "manuscript museum" register; cyan-on-dark dashboard defaults; gradient text; colored border-left stripes; uniform card grids; mega-h1 page titles that repeat the nav label.

Design Principles

  1. Typography is the architecture; rules are the joinery; boxes are a last resort.
  2. Orange is a signal (state, identity moments), never a wash or a per-row label.
  3. Equivalent typographic dignity for FR / EN / Arabic transliteration.
  4. Computational provenance stays visually explicit (AI-labelled blocks).
  5. Both themes are first-class: light = print room, dark = lamplit reading room.