Context
The research section (/research/: the claims ledger, experiments, objections, evidence, slips, case files, articles, terms and the red team) read like every other reading page: a serif body on the reading surface, mono tables, and dark in a dark system setting. Its readers are CTOs and CEOs, who read consulting reports every week. Since 2026-10-24 the CTO powersuit page positions the work as a complement to McKinsey's AI operating system article, so a finding on this site sits next to that article in the reader's week.
On 2026-10-26 a script in the browser read the computed styles of four consulting publishers and four research publishers:
| Site | Headlines | Body | Colour |
|---|---|---|---|
| mckinsey.com | Bower, weight 300 | McKinsey Sans 300, 20/32 px | deep navy, electric blue, light grey page |
| bcg.com | Henderson BCG Serif 300 | Henderson Sans | dark green, beige page, neon green accent |
| hbr.org | Tiempos Headline | Tiempos Text, GT America | red |
| deloitte.com (Insights) | Adelle Sans Condensed 900 | Adelle Sans Condensed | black, green |
| anthropic.com | anthropicSans | anthropicSans; anthropicSerif loaded | ivory page, near-black text |
| ourworldindata.org | Playfair Display | Lato | navy text, cream page |
| epoch.ai | Messina Sans | Messina Sans | dark teal, mint |
| metr.org | Instrument Sans | Instrument Sans | teal green |
bain.com answered with a bot check and was not read. The consulting register is a light-weight serif for headlines, a body of 18 to 20 px, a light page, one deep colour and one accent, and numbered exhibits with a title above and a source line below. Bower is McKinsey's own typeface (Radim Peško with Wolff Olins); McKinsey's own slides fall back to Georgia and Arial.
Three registers were built on the abliteration experiment page and compared on screenshots: a report (the consulting register), a paper (LaTeX and Tufte: EB Garamond, numbered sections, three-rule tables) and a lab (the research labs: Inter Tight on ivory, mono tables). The paper is closest to the current serif pages and so changes least; the lab reads as an AI lab, not an adviser. Stefan Coetzee chose the report on 2026-10-26.
Decision
The chrome sets the theme by URL. THEMED in scripts/site_chrome.py becomes a list of URL prefixes and themes: /inside/ gets intranet (ADR-0035), /research/ gets report, every other page gets no attribute. python3 scripts/site_chrome.py --check holds it in the required job, and a new research page gets the theme from the chrome with no step of its own. The theme is fixed: there is no switch for the reader.
Light in both system settings. The dark values in design/tokens.css skip the report theme, as they skip the intranet theme. Every consulting and research publisher read above serves a light page. The rest of the public site keeps light and dark from the visitor's setting, and the top bar stays dark. Replaced by ADR-0042: every page is light.
Our colours, their register. The tokens keep the site's teal as the one accent (#1F6B5E on white) and use a deep teal ink (#0F1E22) and a dark teal title band (#0E2A2B). No other publisher's colour or typeface is used, and nothing on the pages claims an affiliation.
Type. Headlines are Newsreader at weight 300 (Production Type), the body and tables Inter (Rasmus Andersson) at 400, 400 italic and 600, both from @fontsource 5.3.0, latin subset, under the SIL Open Font License 1.1, self-hosted in /fonts/ with their licence files (ADR-0010). The five files weigh about 119 KB together; a browser fetches them only on a page that uses them, so pages outside the theme load nothing new. The chrome (bar, sidebar, footer) keeps its own fonts.
Layout. The eyebrow, title and subtitle sit on the dark band. The band and its light text share one selector, header:has(> h1), so a browser without :has() (Firefox before 121, Safari before 15.4) shows the title in the page colours with no band, never light text on white; h2 headings are Newsreader 300 with a short teal rule above; tables lose their vertical rules and get a dark top rule, uppercase column heads and hairlines between rows.
Exhibits. A table with a <caption> is an exhibit: the theme numbers it ("Exhibit 1", "Exhibit 2" in page order) above its caption. Replaced by ADR-0040 for the numbering: the site chrome now writes the number into the HTML. Report pages caption their tables: the experiments, the experiment pages, the red-team method, the case files and the articles. Ledgers and indexes (the claims ledger, objections, evidence, slips, the red-team catalogue) keep plain tables. A <p class="exhibit-source"> under an exhibit names the published data behind it and links the file; an exhibit whose data is not published has no source line rather than an unchecked one. In this change the abliteration page has source lines; the other exhibits get them when their run records are published.
Contrast. On white the text tokens reach 17.1:1, 10.0:1 and 6.9:1 and the teal 6.3:1; on the sunken surface the lowest pair is the teal at 5.7:1. On the band the title reaches 15.2:1, the subtitle 11.6:1 and the eyebrow 8.6:1. The focus ring of a link on the band takes the eyebrow colour (8.6:1), because the teal ring of the rest of the page would reach only 2.4:1 there. Every pair meets WCAG 2.2 AA, the ring the 3:1 of SC 1.4.11.
Consequences
The research section reads as a set of reports, distinct from the rest of the public site and from Inside, in both system settings. Fifteen pages change by one attribute on <html>; five pages gain table captions, and the abliteration page gains two source lines. A new table on a report page needs a caption to become an exhibit. Readers who set a dark system theme see the research pages light. The social preview images of the research pages still show the old look until they are taken again.