Workbook Visual Design Standard¶
Scope¶
This standard defines general visual conventions for Digital Products workbooks. It is specific to this venture — it is not the company's visual design standard and it does not apply to Shelfery or any other venture's products, each of which may adopt its own visual system.
This standard does not depend on the final public brand identity (unresolved — see ../strategy/brand-and-positioning.md); it governs functional visual conventions that hold regardless of what the eventual brand palette turns out to be.
Aesthetic direction¶
Products should read as clean, professional, and trustworthy rather than decorative or novelty-themed. Visual restraint is preferred over dense ornamentation: whitespace, consistent alignment, and a limited color palette communicate care and precision, which supports the venture's positioning around auditable, trustworthy tools.
Color coding convention¶
A consistent color convention should be used across products to distinguish cell types, so a customer who has used one Digital Products tool immediately understands another:
- Input cells (customer-editable): a distinct fill/border treatment reserved exclusively for cells the customer is meant to type into.
- Calculated cells: a neutral, non-input treatment (e.g., no fill, or a clearly different fill from input cells) so they read as "not for typing."
- Output/summary cells (dashboard, reports): a treatment distinct from both raw calculated cells and input cells, signaling "this is the answer."
The specific colors chosen should be documented once per product (or once venture-wide if a shared convention is adopted) so they're applied consistently, and must not rely on color alone to convey meaning — see accessibility-standard.md.
Typography¶
- Use a small number of legible, widely available fonts (Excel's default theme fonts are an acceptable baseline) rather than decorative or hard-to-read fonts.
- Reserve larger/bolder type for headers and key outputs; body and input text should stay at a consistently legible size across a product.
Number formatting¶
- Number formats should be applied consistently and meaningfully: currency values formatted as currency, percentages as percentages, dates in a consistent format across the product.
- Avoid displaying more decimal precision than is meaningful for the value being shown (e.g., currency typically doesn't need more than two decimal places; a computed rate might reasonably need more).
- Negative values, if used, should be represented in a way that's unambiguous (parentheses or a minus sign, applied consistently within a product).