The predecessor theme was ugly for two structural reasons, not one.
It did not use the design system's colours. It built a parallel OKLCH
palette "derived from the Australis philosophy" and swapped the canonical
typeface for Supreme -- a fork, not a theme. Every hex here is now copied
verbatim from ~/.claude/skills/australis-design/colors_and_type.css, and
build.py re-checks all 19 against that file at build time and warns on
drift so it cannot quietly fork again. Type is the canonical stack: Space
Grotesk / Inter / JetBrains Mono, vendored as latin-subset VARIABLE woff2
(one file per family, 102 KB total against 56 KB for three static Supreme
cuts, and no Google Fonts request at page load).
It also carried a generated full-bleed aurora image behind the entire
dashboard. Canon forbids exactly that -- "solid fills only on chrome, no
full-bleed photography, no decorative gradients", and the aurora motif
"never as a background fill behind text". The predecessor knew, said so in
its own header, and dialled the opacity down rather than dropping it. The
image is gone; the aurora survives as a 1px accent edge under the tab bar,
which is where canon sanctions it. The asset stays in images/ in case it
is ever revisited.
Direction is instrument panel. Group headings become the Australis mono
eyebrow with a hairline to the right edge -- canon calls the eyebrow a
system signature, and it turns the groups into register bands instead of
headings floating over a grid. Status stops shouting: the filled emerald
chips read louder than the service names they annotated, so they are now a
semantic dot plus a mono micro-label at tertiary contrast. Cards are
bordered and opaque, per canon's border-over-shadow rule for chrome.
Alignment, per operator feedback that pills and cards did not line up:
- The status cluster is centred on the service name's line rather than
parked in the card's top-right corner, where Homepage's `absolute top-0`
left it floating ~7px above the title's optical centre. The offsets
reconstruct the title line box and are documented as moving together.
- Descriptions get a two-line minimum, so the common one-line/two-line mix
bottom-aligns across a row. This is what made the grid look ragged.
useEqualHeights stays false: it inflated short cards to match a widget
card twice their height, which was the worse failure.
- The status dot is flex-centred rather than nudged with vertical-align,
so it stays centred if the type scale changes.
Retires the Skyfall sources and the Supreme faces; theme/ now has one
source of truth.
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