Basefox · Decisions locked · 26 Aug 2026

Warm Sans, caps, and the line-art tier

Both calls applied and shipping. The line-art approach is wired end to end and verified against a real build; brand cards stay logo-led.

62Swift tests pass

60Pipeline tests pass

3Typefaces, down from 5

0 / 20Assets outstanding

1 · Warm Sans is now the system

Archivo for display, Source Sans 3 for body, Spline Sans Mono unchanged. The other three candidates are deleted, along with Space Grotesk, Barlow, and Fraunces — five bundled faces down to three. TypeSystem.swift and the -type= flag are gone, and the winner is inlined in Fonts.swift.

2 · Hero display is set in caps

Caps at 22pt and above, letterspaced 0.3, narrowing to wdth 89 — the width axis was already switching at that threshold, so caps and condensing arrive together. Below 22pt display stays sentence case at full width, which keeps row titles and labels readable. The accent rule from your mockup sits between the headline and the descriptor, in the card's own colour.

Hero card before — Before — Space Grotesk, sentence case

Hero card after — After — Archivo caps + accent rule

This settles the spec contradiction. basefox-spec-v03.md no longer says “no letterspaced all-caps”; it now states the caps threshold, the letterspacing, the width axis, and the accent rule.

3 · The line-art tier is wired

Tier 3 became two rungs. A category names a drawing and an SF Symbol, so the tier always resolves and the app is still complete with an empty asset directory.

Tier	What it is	Source	Needs a file
1 · Campaign	Line art composed for one sale	`ExchangeEvent.hero`	yes
2 · Brand	Merchant lockup	`Brand.logo`	yes
3 · Category	Library object, else SF Symbol	`Category.illustration` → `Category.glyph`	no
4 · Generic	Abstract pattern, drawn in code	—	no

Three decisions baked in

The accent belongs to the card, not the file. An illustration is a single-ink object with no background. The accent disc and contour texture are drawn in code from the card's own colour, so one file serves hero and standard, and the colour comes from Brand.accent, which already exists.
PDF, not SVG. SwiftUI does not render SVG. SVG stays the working master; PDF ships. larchpipe assets sync writes the imageset with preserves-vector-representation set, so one file scales to every size.
Compact carries no line art. At 42pt the strokes collapse, so a list row falls through to the flat accent mark — which is what your What's New rows already do.

Verified against a real build

I drew two throwaway placeholders to the spec, ran the sync, and rendered them. Both were deleted afterwards, so nothing fake ships — the screenshot is the evidence, not the artwork.

Exchange cards with placeholder line art

Placeholder tent resolving through tier 3, with the accent disc and topo texture drawn in code behind it. The thin stroke is the placeholder's fault, and it is what produced the calibration fix below.

A bug the verification caught

The AAFES card carries [footwear, outdoor]. The resolver took the first-named illustration, so it asked for illus-footwear, found no file, and dropped to the SF Symbol — even though outdoor's drawing existed. It now tries every named candidate in card order and takes the first that resolves. Without this, partial library coverage would have looked like no coverage.

A calibration finding for whoever draws these

My placeholders used 4pt strokes on a 512pt artboard. On a standard card that renders at roughly 0.8pt and nearly disappears. registry/assets/README.md now specifies 10pt and says so explicitly: if the drawing looks heavy on the artboard, it is probably right in the app.

Related: while coverage is partial, the browse tiles mix line art and SF Symbols, and the two do not match in weight. Commissioning all seven category objects together avoids a transitional period where the row looks inconsistent.

4 · Brand cards stay logo-led

Line art cannot distinguish Hoka from Brooks — both would show a generic running shoe — so tier 2 remains the treatment for a merchant, and the ten lockups are still needed. That is now written into the spec rather than left implicit.

Where the app stands with nothing supplied

Home on a clean install — Clean install · 0 of 20 assets

Category tiles — Browse tiles falling through to SF Symbols

The asset queue, now 20

Count	What	Format	Cost of absence
10	Brand lockups	PNG, 900 × 240 @3x	Card drops to the category mark
7	Category objects	PDF vector, 512pt artboard	Falls back to the SF Symbol
3	Campaign compositions	PDF vector	Falls back to the category object

larchpipe assets sync --dry-run lists all twenty by name and states what each one's absence costs. Drawing specs are in registry/assets/README.md.

Deliberately not done

MCX. Your mockup added a third exchange. That is a new ChannelKind case across four contract mirrors, registry entries, and a source to sweep — ingestion work, and adding one exchange invites CGX. Left alone pending your call.
Paging dots on the exchange row. The mockup implies snapping; the row scrolls freely today. Small change, not in this pass.
Route and occasion boards still hand-roll rows instead of composing cards.
Offer expiry. Nothing writes Route.endsOn, so the Ending Soon card still fires only from exchange events.