Changelog — guidelines/#

Curated record of the interface guidelines — added, revised, retired. Newest first. A line lands here in the same PR as the change.

2026-08-07#

• Added GUIDE.presentations.md — deck law, extending the area beyond app surfaces. Prompted by a recorded failure: the v1 investor Introduction deck shipped with tool-default substitute fonts (Cambria/Calibri) because no presentation guideline existed, and was retired. Covers the living-page standard (a deck's primary form is a page; provenance stamps in comments, never on the face), the slide type scale, the three slide surfaces with a drenched budget (bookends + one earned interior moment; amber as the single sharp accent — recommended stance pending RCTX-96), layout grid, six archetypes mapped to the Master Copy Deck M-ID families, the motif rules, an explicit font-delivery policy for exports (living page → PDF-of-record with OFL fonts embedded → PPTX only on explicit request, with a governed substitution stack), and the do/don't list.
• Revised GUIDE.presentations.md — two rules from defects found on the first page built to it (both fixed in relay-resources 7421469): links inside slide sections must use built URLs, not .md source paths (a slide is raw HTML, so the generator never rewrites them — the investor deck's round link shipped as a literal .md target and 404'd), and a target figure must never be phrased as achieved ("10% committed" where committed is $0 — say "10% of target").
• Tied in across the brand materials so neither guide is findable only from this area: brand/README.md gains a composition-law table (material here, arrangement there); brand/relay-design-system.md points at both from its One-Visual-System note and source table; brand/relay-deck-tokens.css carries a superseded banner (its palette block is the retired v3.4.1 teal-tinted set, its 16:9 numbers survive inside the guide); decks/README.md names the guide as governing law, corrects the stale "PDF primary, HTML secondary" line, and adds a pointers-not-copies table for confidential decks built elsewhere; briefs/SPEC.design-v35.md records the drenched budget as a presentation-surface answer to its open dark-panels question, with RCTX-96 still owning the site call.
• Added GUIDE.documents.md — document law, same intake. Document anatomy and page chrome, living-document versioning (the maintenance comment block, bump-on-every-change, figures as curated copies), the per-viewer watermark standard codified from relay-resources investor-watermark.js (Access identity → header stamp + tiled diagonal mark, print-safe, fail-to-"Confidential"), and letterhead-as-PDF.

2026-08-04#

• Revised GUIDE.states-and-language.md — the invalid-Code example told writers to say "Codes are 6 characters, like ABC123." The server now mints at 10 under wide_mint and legacy 6-char Codes stay valid forever, so error copy must never name a character count. Replaced with a shape-only example and a note on why.

2026-08-03#

• Added index.html — the area card index, so /guidelines/ is a published surface like concepts/, brand/, and mcp/ rather than raw markdown behind a redirect. Four sections: Start here · Surfaces · Language · Where these come from (charter, findings register, brief, and the design system it sits above). Built on the shared v3.5 area-index pattern.
• Added the area — five documents establishing interface law for the estate, split from the design system (material) and the briefs (direction):
• Interface principles — the governing principle (display weight is proportional to information value) with its two corollaries (show the exception, not the default; identity is never what gets truncated), the seven rules as design law, and the standing rules.
• Mobile composition — 390px-first, the space budget (rail off-canvas, ≤2 rows of chrome), controls-on-demand behind a filter sheet, reach, sheets over modals, touch and input, no horizontal overflow.
• List surfaces — card anatomy with identity composed first and sacrificed last, the badge rule, untitled-object fallback order, mandatory pagination, the combinable filter model, the 0/3/500 volume check.
• States & language — three distinct empties with a mandatory has-content guard, the error formula, gate states, honest time, voice, the locked vocabulary, copy budgets at 390px.
• Harness surface — the agent harness as a designed surface: two readers, the context budget, ids always with names, verb-direction clarity, gates spent only where stakes justify.

Derived from the first real intake of the experience program (EXP-001…EXP-008) rather than imported wholesale — every non-obvious rule traces to a recorded finding. All five carry framework notes marking what is generic versus Relay-specific, for Launchpad Phase 2/3.

• Revised List surfaces + Interface principles — reconciled the card head with DEC-025 (briefs/BRIEF.code-presence.md). The first draft proposed a title-first card with the Code demoted to a secondary line, which contradicts L2 (one teal moment per object — the Code is the brightest element when present) and L3 (the title never changes rank; nothing is promoted to fill the gap when the Code is absent). Card anatomy now states both states with the head closing up on codeless objects, the badge rule carries L4 (absence is a selectable filter, not a mark on every row), and the untitled fallback defers to the DEC-025 title floor. The governing corollary was reworded from "identity is never truncated" to "recall is never truncated to a stub" — legibility and rank are different claims.