The reference is an admiralty chart and a drafting rule, not a SaaS dashboard. Warm paper, sea-green ink, hairline rules, and four signal colours reserved for readiness alone. The surface stays quiet so the status does all the shouting — because the product's only job is to tell you plainly what is not ready.
Both projects below are scored against the same rubric. The one on the left is further along and reads red, because a required criterion is unmet — and nine tenths of a launch is not a launch. If the identity carries one idea, it is this one.
Green-black ink rather than grey-black, so it sits under the sea-green instead of beside it. No pure white anywhere — chart paper has age in it.
The moment one of these appears decoratively it stops meaning anything. They are not part of the accent system and never carry brand duty.
A chart-plate serif for headings and figures, a plain grotesque for prose, and a mono for identifiers — because a criterion key is an identifier and should read like one.
Criteria from the built-in launch-readiness rubric, at four of the five statuses. Guidance sits under the title because it is the acceptance criteria, not a tooltip.
Cards generated from the rubric's gaps carry the criterion key they exist to satisfy. That tag is the whole join between the two halves of the product.
Eight projects against three rubrics. Illustrative data, chosen to show how the palette behaves across the full spread of readiness states.
| Project | Rubric | Progress | Score | Readiness |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Tideline | Discovery | 6% | Blocked 5 | |
| Dovetail | Discovery | 15% | Blocked 5 | |
| Ledger | Launch readiness | 28% | Blocked 10 | |
| Beacon | Launch readiness | 37% | Blocked 11 | |
| Sextant | Discovery | 44% | Blocked 3 | |
| Meridian | Security baseline | 46% | Blocked 5 | |
| Cormorant | Launch readiness | 57% | Blocked 9 | |
| Atlas | Launch readiness | 93% | Blocked 1 |