GUIDE.documents — one-pagers, memos, and living documents#
The law for how a Relay document is composed — page chrome, versioning, and the per-viewer watermark standard. Covers one-pagers, memos, letters, and every gated living document (the investor package pages are the reference implementation).
Added 2026-08-07 with GUIDE.presentations.md, from the investor-package build.
Where this sits#
Material comes from relay-app/DESIGN.md + packages/ui/tokens.css; copy gates come from briefs/BRIEF.emblematic-headlines.md §Hard constraints (Relay never RelayCTX · claim · no memory / persistence / continuity · "protection in progress" · outcome-level disclosure). This document owns the composition: what makes a page or a PDF read as a Relay document, and what every gated document must carry.
1 · Document anatomy#
Top to bottom, every document — page or file:
- Header — the wordmark (Relay, Outfit 600, −0.02em) and, when useful, a mono eyebrow naming the document type ("One-pager", "Memo", "Round status"). On site surfaces the site chrome is the header; don't repeat the wordmark in the body.
- Title — Cormorant Garamond italic display. One per document (Single Display Rule).
- Viewer stamp — gated documents only: the
#viewer-stampelement directly under the title (see §3). Ungated documents omit it. - Body — Outfit, 1.6–1.7 leading. Structured data (Codes, dates, figures in tables) in JetBrains Mono. Callouts as flat surface blocks (0.5px border, 8px radius) — no side-stripes, no shadows.
- Contact block — name · role · entity · email, with mailto links.
- Foot — the version line (
**Version:** vN · **Last verified:** YYYY-MM-DD) and the confidential line (Confidential — Relay Context Inc. Do not distribute without consent.) in that order. Ungated public documents may drop the confidential line; nothing drops the version line.
2 · Living documents and versioning#
A Relay document's primary form is a maintained page, not a file — versioned, current as of the stamp it carries, and (when gated) stamped to its viewer. Rules:
- The maintenance comment. Every governed page opens with an HTML comment block stating:
placement(which branch/surface it belongs to and where it must never go),altitude(the disclosure + vocabulary gates in force),living(the no-downloads posture where it applies),versioning(what bumps the stamp), andsync(the source of truth for every figure, and the change-together rule). Seerelay-resourcesdocs/investor/index.mdfor the canonical form. - Bump on every copy change. The version line is the reader's freshness contract; a stale number on a governed page is worse than no number.
- Figures are curated copies. A governed page never reads from an internal system; every figure names its source of record, and changes land here in the same pass as the source.
3 · The per-viewer watermark standard#
Every gated document page carries both marks. Reference implementation: relay-resources/docs/assets/javascripts/investor-watermark.js.
| Standard | |
|---|---|
| Identity source | Cloudflare Access, GET /cdn-cgi/access/get-identity (same-origin, credentials: include) on any Access-gated host |
| Header stamp | #viewer-stamp element: Prepared for <email> · <YYYY-MM-DD>; mono, ~0.72rem, muted |
| Tiled watermark | Repeating SVG tile 720×260: <email> · Confidential — Relay Context Inc. · <date>, JetBrains Mono 15px, fill rgba(13,148,136,0.09), rotated −24° |
| Overlay | position: fixed; inset: 0, pointer-events: none, aria-hidden="true", above content |
The watermark prints: print-color-adjust: exact — a printed page is still stamped | |
| Fallback | No identity (local preview, misconfigured gate): stamp reads Confidential · <date>, watermark drops the email — fail to "Confidential", never to blank |
| Inclusion | Per page: <script src="../assets/javascripts/investor-watermark.js"></script> at the foot |
The watermark is attribution and deterrent, not protection — protection is the Access app in front of the page. Never treat a stamp as a reason to relax a gate, and never put content on a stamped page that its gate wouldn't cover anyway.
4 · Documents as files — letterhead#
When a document must exist as a file, the same position as presentations (GUIDE.presentations.md §7): PDF rendered from the same HTML, brand fonts embedded (all three families are OFL; embedding is unrestricted). No .docx leaves the company unless a counterparty's process requires it, and then alongside the PDF of record.
Letterhead chrome for the PDF: wordmark top-left · document-type eyebrow top-right (mono) · title display · body per §1 · foot with the version line, the confidential line, and the entity line (Relay Context Inc.). If the file is prepared for a named recipient, the header stamp and tiled watermark render into the PDF at generation time — same format as §3, identity supplied by the generator instead of Access.
5 · Do / Don't#
Do
- Open every governed page with the maintenance comment block, and keep placement rules in it honest (a finance page that must never merge to
mainsays so at its own top). - Keep gated pages' search posture correct: founder-only and per-recipient pages carry
search: exclude: true— a shared search index leaks across a narrower gate. - Copy the apex line and headline-ladder lines verbatim where they're used — they're governed (RCTX-282), not raw material.
Don't
- Don't add download copies of a living gated document — the posture is deliberate; reversing it is a decision, not a convenience.
- Don't duplicate a canonical figure onto a second page — link to the page that owns it.
- Don't ship a gated page without the viewer stamp + watermark script, and don't ship any document without the version line.
- Don't put the viewer's name into copy ("Dear …") on living pages — the stamp carries the identity; the copy stays maintainable.
Companion: GUIDE.presentations.md · reference implementations: relay-resources docs/investor/ (investor branch) — package landing, one-pager, Round Status, Introduction deck.