xe-design-system

Xe Iaso Design System — Skill

When to use

Reach for this system when building anything that should feel like xeiaso.net — a personal technical blog with a conversational voice, warm neutrals, and a cast of sticker characters. Good fits: long-form posts, one-person portfolios, zine-style project pages, fictional-conversation explainers. Bad fits: enterprise dashboards, consumer apps, anything that wants to feel "clean, modern SaaS."

Files

• README.md — full context, content fundamentals, visual foundations, iconography
• colors_and_type.css — drop-in tokens + primitives; start here
• fonts/ — Podkova (serif, headings), Schibsted Grotesk (sans, body)
• assets/ — Xe orca mascot logo SVG, Graphviz diagrams
• preview/ — small design-system cards (type, color scales, components)

Using it

1. Link colors_and_type.css into your HTML. It registers @font-face for Podkova and Schibsted Grotesk (Iosevka Curly Iaso is only aspirational — falls back to ui-monospace).
2. Use the CSS vars for colors: --bg-hard / --bg-soft / --bg-0..4 for surfaces, --fg-0..4 for text, muted accents (--red, --blue, etc.) in light mode and their -bright siblings in dark.
3. Typeset with the defaults — <h1..h6> are already Podkova, body is Schibsted Grotesk. Add text-wrap: pretty for headings (already applied to p).
4. For distinctive interactions, let links pick up the invert-on-hover magenta — don't override a:hover.
5. For characters talking, use the Conv/chat pattern shown in preview/chat-conv.html — stacked rows sharing a --bg-soft background, 64×64 boxy avatar, name link + message.

Do

• Warm cream surfaces (#f9f5d7) in light, warm charcoal (#1d2021) in dark.
• Serif headings (Podkova 600), sans body.
• 1px borders, soft two-step shadows, 6–12px radii.
• Tabler stroke icons (24×24, stroke-width 2, round caps) when icons are needed — usually they aren't.
• Stickers from stickers.xeiaso.net/sticker/{char}/{mood} when showing characters speak.
• Sentence-case headings, first-person conversational voice, dry humor.

Don't

• Don't introduce blue-purple gradients, neon, or cool grays — the palette is Gruvbox warm-neutral.
• Don't add emoji decoratively; the stickers are the emotional channel.
• Don't use "left-border accent" cards — only PullQuote has the left bar, intentionally.
• Don't invent icons in SVG — use placeholders or Tabler.
• Don't override link hover behavior — the magenta invert is a signature.
• Don't pad with filler copy; this voice is spare and personal.

Content tone

Xe writes with the reader: warm, a bit confrontational, willing to be weird. Pronouns it/its (also they/them). Technical terms keep their casing (NixOS, Kubernetes, Tailscale). When in doubt, be specific and slightly funny; never generic.

Known substitutions

• Iosevka Curly Iaso mono is custom-cut and served from files.xeiaso.net — not bundled. ui-monospace fallback is fine.
• Sticker art lives at live URLs; not copied locally.
• Hero imagery is linked from files.xeiaso.net/hero/ in the original; use placeholders for new work and flag if real imagery is needed.