Documents

A document is not a screen that happens to be printed. It has a fixed page box, no hover state, no dark mode, and one shot at being legible on a printer nobody tested. This page defines the pattern the system uses for short, laid-out documents, and links the worked example.

Longer, flowing documents — reports and papers — use the LaTeX and Typst templates in brand/templates/ instead. The split is about pagination, not length; see below.

Decide the pagination first

Two kinds of document, and the choice is made before any layout happens:

Getting this wrong is expensive in one direction: a flowing document forced into fixed pages breaks the moment a paragraph grows, while a designed page that is allowed to reflow loses the arrangement that was its whole purpose.

Never pin a paper size on a flowing document. Letter and A4 differ, the reader’s printer knows which one it has, and the text should reflow onto it. A paginated document does pin a page box, and each page is designed to fill Letter and A4 alike without overlap.

The one-page document

Header, summary, body sections, and a footer region — with the whole thing constrained to fit a single page rather than allowed to run onto a second.

The section markers are the only accent on the page, and they are text. A document has no primary action, so there is nothing for a solid accent to mark — an accent-filled band on a CV is decoration claiming to be emphasis.

Entries are separated by space, not by rules. A one-page document accumulates horizontal rules faster than anything else in the system, and each one costs a line of content while adding a section break to a document with one section per heading — the same argument the signature makes, on a bigger sheet.

Dates and other data are set in IBM Plex Mono and right-aligned against the entry title, so a reader scanning chronology has a column to scan.

Fitting one page

The constraint that makes this pattern hard is that the content has to end where the page does.

• Cut content, not type. 14.5px body and 13.5px entries are the floor. A document set at 11px to fit is a document that will not be read.
• Cut the oldest entry first. A CV is not an archive; a proposal is not a contract.
• The two-up region is the pressure valve. Two short sections side by side recover roughly a third of a page against stacking them.
• Check it at 100%. A browser zoomed to 90% will happily show you a page that overflows in print.

Exporting

The example is HTML on the paged-document shell; the export route is the browser’s print dialogue, to PDF.

• Print backgrounds on, margins default, headers and footers off — the browser’s own header would print a URL across the top of a CV.
• Send the PDF, not the HTML. The HTML depends on a font load and a runtime; the PDF depends on nothing.
• Check the PDF at 100% and printed on plain paper before it goes anywhere.

Reusing the pattern

The resume is the worked example, but the pattern is not resume-specific. A one-page proposal, a project brief, and a decision memo are the same document with different section names:

Where the document makes a claim about a project’s maturity, the status vocabulary applies — a document is not exempt from it because it is prose.