One product. Four kinds of work.
A quiet global shell can hold dense, specialised workspaces. The system owns identity — type, colour, interaction, state, provenance. A workspace owns its work: its regions, its tools, its density, its layout. Moving from Research to Code should teach a person nothing new about what vermilion means.
Global owns identity. The workspace owns the work.
Specialisation is for usability, not for variety. A workspace that changes the colour semantics or the button behaviour has exceeded its authority.
Global Milo — a workspace may not change it
- typography: families, scale, the three semantic roles
- semantic colour: Vermilion = Milo, Moss = Offline
- interaction and keyboard model
- spacing scale, grid, depth levels
- primary navigation and the surface around it
- status and state vocabulary
- motion vocabulary and durations
- provenance rules · permissions · confirmations
- component behaviour
The workspace — within those constraints
- information density inside its regions
- its tools and their grouping
- secondary navigation inside the workspace
- visualisation of its own material
- workflow controls and their order
- artifact layout and data presentation
- contextual imagery, when the source is the subject
- its own empty, loading and error copy
Strong defaults first. Customisation second.
The Flexibility–Usability tradeoff, resolved in a fixed order: Milo opens a purpose-built workspace for known work; then the person resizes, rearranges, docks, stacks and pins; later, advanced users save arrangements.
Milo never opens with “here are forty panes, build your workspace.” A workspace that cannot state its own default arrangement is not ready to ship.
Real windows, real tools
A workspace may show a terminal, a browser, a file tree, an artifact or an activity feed. Here they are prototypes — HTML that shows arrangement and behaviour. In production every one must connect to a real, actionable surface. On Omarchy, Hyprland manages real external applications; Milo arranges and addresses them, it does not repaint them. No fake panes: if a region cannot be made real, it does not ship.
Design-system prototypes, not production tools.
Each one is at STUDIO intensity and declares it. Each keeps the Milo invariants: one primary action, the state vocabulary, semantic colour, provenance where a source appears.
Daily Bread
Editorial, spiritual, publishing-oriented. Modern newsroom × editorial magazine × a reverent publication system. Serif carries scripture and draft, because that material is language. Not church software: no ornament, no stained glass.
SCRIPTURE · DRAFT · EDITORIAL · ART · NARRATION · SOURCES · PUBLISH · QUALITY GATE
Open the prototype ↗Design
Visual, artifact-first, minimal chrome. The work dominates; the interface gets out of the way. Every artifact carries what made it — model, inputs, version lineage — and every human source carries its credit.
ARTIFACT · REFERENCES · VERSIONS · GENERATION · CRITIQUE · EXPORT
Open the prototype ↗Research
Information-dense, source and evidence driven. Legitimately far denser than Today. Every claim carries its source; a claim without evidence is drawn as unsupported, never hidden.
SOURCES · CLAIMS · NOTES · EVIDENCE · SYNTHESIS · PROVENANCE
Open the prototype ↗Code
Technical, precise, machine-forward. More mono, less imagery. Vermilion where Milo acts, Moss where work runs locally, nothing else coloured.
TASK · FILES · DIFF · TESTS · TERMINAL · RUN STATE
Open the prototype ↗Take the information architecture. Leave the styling.
A customised Hermes OS reference demonstrated one thing worth having: a quiet global shell coexisting with dense specialised workspaces. That is an architecture lesson, not a visual one.
Milo's surfaces keep Milo's type, colour, spacing and devices. Nous and Hermes contribute computational atmosphere and technical confidence to the creative equation; cloning their layouts or marks is forbidden (01 Foundations).
How a workspace stays Milo
- Shipped tokens and milo.css; no new colour, family or radius.
- Vermilion only where Milo is present or acting; Moss only for local capability.
- Serif for meaning, sans for operation, mono for machine.
- Every state is glyph + colour + label from the shared vocabulary.
- Exactly one primary action.
- Provenance visible wherever a source or generated artifact appears.
- A stated default arrangement, good enough to work in before customisation.
- Density matches the declared intensity level.
python3 tools/jev.py ask recognisable --file site/pages/screens/workspace-code.html