GUIDE.presentations — decks and presentation surfaces#

The law for how a Relay presentation is composed — on any surface: a living page, a projected deck, or an exported file.

Added 2026-08-07, from the investor-package build: the v1 Introduction deck shipped with tool-default substitute fonts (Cambria/Calibri) because no presentation guideline existed. That deck was retired. This document is what was missing.

Where this sits#

Same three layers as the rest of this area:

A deck never invents copy or colour. It cuts slides from the Master Copy Deck by M-ID, renders them to this law, and inherits the copy gates verbatim.

Copy gates (inherited, non-negotiable)#

• External copy says Relay, never RelayCTX. The legal entity line is Relay Context Inc.
• Never memory, persistence, or continuity. Governance vocabulary: provenance / audit / control / portability / trust. The user verb is claim.
• "Protection in progress" — never "patent-pending" until the provisional is filed.
• Disclosure stays at outcome level: no mechanism, no architecture internals, no novelty counts or names — in copy and in imagery (see Motifs).
• Gate tiers (OPEN / NDA / NDA+FILED) travel with the slide. A higher-gate slide never appears on a lower-tier surface, whatever the format.
• Numbers come from their canonical page (for the round: relay-resources docs/investor/round-status.md). Link to the source; don't duplicate terms onto slides.

1 · The living-page standard#

A deck's primary form is a page, not a file. On gated surfaces (the investor package) this is mandatory: no downloadable files — a file leaves the gate the moment it is downloaded; a page stays current, governed, and attributable to its viewer.

A living deck page is a sequence of slide sections inside a .rly-deck wrapper. Each slide is one <section class="rly-slide"> (drenched variant: rly-slide--drenched) and reads top to bottom:

1. Kicker — mono eyebrow naming the moment ("The problem", "How it moves"). Never a slide number: decks reorder freely, and faces carry no position.
2. Display headline — the one Cormorant italic moment. On a deck page, each slide section counts as a view for the Single Display Rule: one display headline per slide, never two.
3. Body — the slide's sentences, verbatim from the Master Copy Deck. Two short paragraphs maximum; a slide that needs more is two slides.
4. Figure / motif — optional: flow nodes, category cards, the Code chip, a stat.
5. Pull quote — the base line, when the M-ID carries one.

Links inside slide sections use built URLs, not source paths. A slide is raw HTML, and static-site generators only rewrite .md links in Markdown — inside an HTML block they ship verbatim and 404. Write href="../rounds/pre-seed/", never href="rounds/pre-seed.md", and verify against the built tree rather than the source tree. (Recorded defect, 2026-08-07: the investor deck's round link shipped as a literal .md target at the wrong depth.) The same applies to the watermark <script src> — check its depth against the page's built URL.

Provenance lives in comments, never on the face. The Master Copy Deck's speaker-note stamp [M-ID · TIER · GATE · vN · YYYY-MM-DD] goes in an HTML comment immediately above each slide section — the page equivalent of speaker notes. No version code, M-ID, or tier text on any slide face.

Page chrome: the page carries a visible version + date stamp at the foot (Version: vN · Last verified: YYYY-MM-DD, bumped on every copy change), the confidential footer line, and — on gated surfaces — the per-viewer stamp and watermark (see GUIDE.documents.md §Watermark).

2 · Type scale#

Three families, three registers — same semantics as every other Relay surface. Two columns: the living page and the 16:9 file (1280×720 / 10"×5.625").

Cormorant Garamond loads italic 300/400/500 only — never fake an upright or a bold italic. Mono is for structured data (Codes, stamps, kickers); never for narrative sentences.

3 · Colour — three slide surfaces#

Consume role tokens (--accent-ui / --accent-text / --accent-fill + --on-accent), never raw teal hexes. Values are dual per theme: #0d9488 light / #2dd4bf dark.

Light (default). The working surface for body slides. Achromatic surfaces (bg → surface → panel → deep), teal on touch points and the Code only, ≤10% of any slide (the Teal Rarity Rule). Flat: 0.5px borders, no shadows, no gradients.

Dark (terminal). The same neutral ramp inverted, for decks presented in a dark theme. Teal fills carry the #0d1514 ink-flip — white on teal (1.9:1) is forbidden in every format, including exports.

Drenched (v3.5 deep). The presentation signature — the deep teal-black gradient linear-gradient(165deg, #0c1413, #0d2b27 55%, #0d3530) with #5eead4 (teal-bright) kickers/accents and near-white text. Budgeted, not ambient:

• Bookends — the cover and the close are drenched. That is the default deck shape.
• At most one interior drenched moment — earned by the slide with the number or claim that deserves the room (the round, the flagship stat). Never two in a row.
• Amber #f3b04e is the single sharp accent on drenched — one element per slide, reserved for the figure that matters. Amber never appears on light surfaces (the light-mode semantic warning #b45309 is a different job).
• Drenched slides keep their colours in both site themes — they do not re-theme.

Status (RCTX-96): the drenched treatment is a v3.5-b signature pending EC ratification. This budget — bookends + one earned interior moment — is the recommended stance and what the investor deck ships with; if RCTX-96 lands differently, this section changes in the same pass.

4 · Grid and layout#

• File canvas: 1280×720 (16:9) · 48px safe margin all sides · content max 1184px.
• Living page: slide frames max-width 900px, padding clamp(32px, 6vw, 64px), 0.5px border (--rly-border), 12px radius, one column; frames stack with 24px gaps. No horizontal overflow at 390px.
• One idea per slide. Headline ≤2 lines at full width; body ≤2 short paragraphs.
• Callout blocks: surface bg, 0.5px border, 8px radius. Rules/dividers: 1px border colour. No side-stripe accents, ever.

5 · Slide archetypes — mapped to the M-ID families#

6 · Motifs#

• Send → Route → Receive nodes — the product motif: numbered circles (hairline teal ring, mono numeral), connected left-to-right by hairline arrows. Teal-bright on drenched. This is a movement metaphor and stays one: never annotate it with envelope/payload internals, signing, or routing detail (disclosure gate).
• The Code chip — mono, uppercase, tracked, accent-text on teal-dim, 6px radius. Use an example-shaped Code (e.g. A4K9R2), never a live one, and never imply a fixed length in copy or layout.
• The Open Signal mark — inline SVG, currentColor only, never boxed, never #00D9C8 as a static fill (motion-only). Sizes and clear space per brand/relay-design-system.md.
• No padlocks, no shields on OPEN-tier slides, no architecture diagrams anywhere below NDA+FILED.

7 · Font delivery for exports — the policy#

The v1 failure this guide exists to prevent: a deck exported with whatever fonts the tool found. The position:

1. The living page is the delivery. Gated surfaces: mandatory (no files). Everywhere else: default. The page loads the real brand fonts; nothing can substitute them.
2. When a file must exist, it is a PDF rendered from the same HTML (print CSS / headless Chromium) with fonts embedded. All three families — Cormorant Garamond, Outfit, JetBrains Mono — are SIL OFL licensed: embedding and subsetting are unrestricted. The PDF is the visual of record for any file that leaves our hands.
3. PPTX only when a recipient explicitly requires an editable deck. It ships with fonts embedded (PowerPoint font embedding; OFL permits it), accompanied by the PDF of record, and with the knowledge that embedding does not survive every host (Keynote, Google Slides, and LibreOffice ignore it). For those hosts the governed substitution stack applies — declared per register, never left to the tool:

Cambria and Calibri are never part of the stack. A substituted deck is a survival mode, not the brand: it is never the version of record and never the first thing a recipient sees.

8 · Do / Don't#

Do

• Cut slide copy verbatim from the Master Copy Deck, M-ID provenance in a comment above every slide, and re-cut when the source changes — never patch a derived deck's facts.
• Keep one display headline per slide, and the teal moment rare enough to mean something.
• Bump the page's version + date stamp on every copy change.
• Build the deck to survive both site themes: light slides on tokens, drenched slides self-contained.
• Respect prefers-reduced-motion on any animated motif.

Don't

• Don't put version codes, M-IDs, tier tags, or slide numbers on a slide face.
• Don't add downloads to a living gated surface — that posture is a decision, not a gap.
• Don't use white on teal (any mode, any format), gradient text, glassmorphism, side-stripe borders, or shadows on resting surfaces.
• Don't exceed the drenched budget (bookends + one earned interior moment), and don't put amber on a light surface.
• Don't let an export pick its own fonts. Cambria/Calibri in a Relay deck is a defect.
• Don't restate NDA-tier numbers (cap, discount, returns) on an OPEN-tier slide — link to the gated page that owns them.
• Don't phrase a target as though it were achieved. "First milestone: 10% committed" reads as money already in when committed is $0 — say "10% of target". Any figure a reader could mistake for progress must be unambiguous on the slide face, not just on the page that owns it. (Recorded defect, 2026-08-07.)

Companion: GUIDE.documents.md (page chrome, watermark, versioning) · brand/relay-deck-tokens.css (16:9 file spec) · reference implementation: the investor Introduction deck at relay-resources docs/investor/introduction.md (investor branch).