Brand and palette

Gurbani Soul is the app; this wiki and the website are separate, scholarly properties that borrow its palette. Scripture is never branded: it is always Sri Guru Granth Sahib Ji · Ang N.

• The brand bookthe gold rule, palette, typography, mark, voice, accessibility and the gates (G1–G4)
• The contrast reportevery required pair, in all four legs, generated by scripts/brand/contrast_report.py
• tokens.jsonthe source of truth: surfaces, Soul Gold, brand and status colours, light · dark · increased contrast

The rules in one breath

• Gold is a fill, never text. The literal brand gold #FFBC0D measures 1.69:1 on white, so it appears only as accentFill, always with an accent border; text, icons and links use accent or accentText.
• Red is fill-only — badges, never text, never beside Gurmukhi — and never in a poster or a diagram on this wiki. Never a gold mark on a red square.
• Gurmukhi is ink-coloured Sant Lipi, never gold, never red. Headings use Source Serif 4.
• Dark mode is warm ink, not grey.

The palette

Surfaces — contrast ink on it

Token	Light	Dark
surfaces.canvas	#F2F2F7 15.45:1	#151210 15.86:1
surfaces.card	#FFFFFF 17.24:1	#1E1A17 14.69:1
surfaces.paper	#FBF7F0 16.15:1	#171412 15.59:1
surfaces.paperWarm	#FDF6E3 15.98:1	#171412 15.59:1

Soul Gold — contrast on paper

Token	Light	Dark
soul.accentFill	#FFBC0D 1.58:1	#FFBC0D 10.87:1
soul.accent	#A87900 3.64:1	#FFBC0D 10.87:1
soul.accentText	#8A6100 5.19:1	#FFBC0D 10.87:1
soul.onAccent	#2B1A05 9.94:1 on accentFill	#2B1A05 9.94:1 on accentFill
soul.accentDeep	#FFB81C 1.62:1	#C08B00 6.05:1

Brand — contrast on paper

Token	Light	Dark
brand.red	#DA291C 4.56:1	#DA291C 3.77:1
brand.onRed	#FFFFFF 4.87:1 on red	#FFFFFF 4.87:1 on red
brand.maroon	#8A1538 8.76:1	#E0658A 5.59:1
brand.kraft	#B69A81 2.48:1	#B69A81 6.92:1

Status — contrast on paper

Token	Light	Dark
status.positive	#27703F 5.66:1	#5BC98C 8.89:1
status.negative	#B33528 5.69:1	#FF7A6B 7.20:1
status.info	#2A63C9 5.28:1	#7FB0FF 8.34:1
status.special	#6D3FBF 6.32:1	#B79AF2 7.79:1

Theme groups — contrast on paper

Token	Light	Dark
themeGroup.divine	#9C4D10 5.65:1	#F2A060 8.71:1
themeGroup.condition	#6B5440 6.63:1	#CDB39A 9.18:1
themeGroup.vices	#7B3F91 6.64:1	#D7A0EA 8.82:1
themeGroup.path	#1D6B67 5.87:1	#62CEC4 9.73:1
themeGroup.virtues	#3E6A1E 5.99:1	#A6D47A 10.76:1
themeGroup.states	#1F62A6 5.86:1	#8EC2F5 9.77:1

On the rendered wiki this is every token in tokens.json — light and dark — with a swatch and its contrast ratio, computed from the file at build. On GitHub, read tokens.json and the contrast report.

The wiki’s own theme (docs-site/src/styles/theme.css) uses the same values for paper, card, accent, accent text, accent fill and the status colours; the docs gates fail a pull request when the two drift (the docs gates).

Three things about the wiki that touch the brand:

• The reading layout (docs-site/src/styles/look.css) takes its patterns from good help centres and its dress from this brand: a 17px body on a 44rem measure, serif headings, a summary under each title, callouts tinted with the status colours (each tint is its colour mixed 10% into paper, 14% into ink; a test recomputes them from tokens.json and checks ink at 4.5:1 and the rule at 3:1), and gold only as a fill. A quotation of scripture is the plainest thing on a page: no tint, no box.
• Section tabs are quiet. The row under the wiki’s header is plain text; the current section is ink with a 2px accent rule under it — never a gold fill, never a pill.
• On paper the body is serif. On screen, headings are Source Serif 4 and the body is the system sans. A printed page and a downloaded PDF set the body in Source Serif 4 as well (docs-site/src/styles/print.css), so every machine embeds the same face; Gurmukhi is Sant Lipi in ink in both. Print is always the light palette, whatever the reader’s theme.
• The wiki links out to assistants; the product does not. Each wiki page offers Ask ChatGPT and Ask Claude as plain outbound links with an instruction that holds the scripture rule. That is a convenience of the engineering wiki, not a feature of Gurbani Soul, which generates nothing: “verbatim, cited by Ang, never AI-invented” is unchanged (ADR-0013).