Surface mapping

Status: Accepted

The brand reaches the three surfaces very unequally. Designing as if the logo and the amber palette apply everywhere is the mistake this page exists to prevent.

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The three surfaces, honestly

flowchart LR
    brand[brand tokens + marks] -->|full| web[Web UI]
    brand -->|mapped subset| tui[TUI]
    brand -->|name only| cli[CLI]

	Web UI	TUI	CLI
Logo (SVG)	✅ full	⚠️ ASCII mark only	⚠️ ASCII mark, optional
Colour palette	✅ all tokens	⚠️ mapped to terminal capability	❌ terminal default
Bricolage Grotesque	✅	❌ terminal font, not ours	❌
Space / radius / shadow	✅	❌ meaningless	❌
The voice (plain, warm, precise)	✅	✅	✅

The last row is the point: what actually carries across all three isn’t the palette — it’s the plain-language voice. The visual brand is largely a web concern.

Web UI — the full brand

The web UI wears everything: the SVG marks, the complete token palette via @lemonfiber/brand (contract), Bricolage Grotesque, the ink theme. This is the one surface the brand was designed for, and the only one where “does it look on-brand?” is a meaningful question.

Everything in brand-rules applies here in full.

TUI — a mapped subset

A terminal is not a canvas. It offers a colour palette the terminal owns (16 / 256 / truecolour, and the user’s theme may override it), a font the user chose, and no concept of spacing units, radii, or shadows.

So the TUI takes a deliberate, small mapping, not the token set:

Brand token	TUI mapping
ink	Default foreground
paper	Default background (often the terminal’s own)
lemon	The one accent — headings, the health-OK state
fiber (amber)	Active/attention — consistent with its signal role
leaf, surfaces, type, space, radius, shadow	Not mapped — no terminal equivalent

Two constraints make this safe:

1. Truecolour is not assumed. The mapping degrades to the 16-colour set, and to no colour at all under NO_COLOR — where G3’s symbols carry all state (G3-R1). Brand colour is enhancement, never the information.
2. The user’s terminal theme wins where it must. A user with a customised palette sees their colours; the TUI maps roles, not exact hexes, so it remains legible in any theme.

The mark, in the TUI, is an ASCII rendering — the patch-panel slice suggested in text, shown in the wizard header and nowhere that needs it to be precise. It is not the SVG and does not pretend to be.

CLI — name, not brand

Piped or scripted output carries essentially no brand: it is plain text, often consumed by another program, and colour there is noise (G3-R7 forbids control sequences in redirected output).

The CLI’s brand is the word lemonfiber and the voice. An optional ASCII mark may appear in interactive help; it never appears in machine output.

Why this asymmetry is stated, not hidden

A designer handed the brand assets will reasonably assume they apply to “the app.” They apply to one third of it. Without this page, effort goes into terminal colour schemes that a NO_COLOR user never sees, or an ASCII logo in JSON output that breaks scripts — both plausible, both wrong.

Stating the mapping up front means each surface gets brand-appropriate effort: full on the web, restrained in the TUI, none in machine output.

Requirements

ID	Requirement
DES-R9	The web UI MUST render the full brand — SVG marks, complete palette, Bricolage Grotesque, ink theme.
DES-R10	The TUI MUST map only a defined subset of tokens to terminal roles, and MUST NOT assume truecolour.
DES-R11	TUI brand colour MUST degrade to the 16-colour set and to no colour under NO_COLOR, with state still conveyed by symbol.
DES-R12	The TUI MUST map colour roles, not exact hex values, so a user’s terminal theme remains legible.
DES-R13	The SVG marks MUST NOT be used in the TUI or CLI; an ASCII rendering MUST be used where a mark is shown.
DES-R14	Machine-readable CLI output MUST carry no brand colour or logo.

Related

• brand-rules.md — the constraints, which apply fully only to web
• accessibility.md — the contrast baseline for the web palette
• G2 Plain-language — the voice, which does carry across
• G3 Accessibility