DESIGN.md — Taiho Ventures, LLC (Salmon Broadsheet)

Per-style brand authority for src/styles/15-salmon-broadsheet-cvc/. Produced and maintained by columbus-design-md-builder. Read by columbus-design-author at scaffold time and by columbus-design-iterator on every refinement. Treat sections 1–7 as canonical truth.

1. Aesthetic Anchor

Primary family: Editorial Minimalism, broadsheet variant — the FT Weekend digital edition treated as a typographic field with a single inset cinematic plate. Secondary remix: Cinematic Dark, but tightly contained — the film loop sits as a plate on paper, never as a page-wide background. Reference brands: Financial Times (the salmon paper, the deck-led front page, the disciplined column grid) × NYT.com front page (the multi-deck headline architecture and dateline rigor) × New York Magazine longreads (the cinematic plate inset on type). Visual atmosphere: Salmon-cream paper background carries the entire page; ink-black serif type runs over it in a four-column broadsheet grid. Above the fold, a single quiet film loop — Menlo Park lab interior, vial in soft daylight, partner reading at a desk — sits inside a thin keyline frame with a typeset caption beneath, the way an old broadsheet inset a halftone photo. Below the fold, dense column work: lede story, subsidiary stack, dispatch sidebar. The page reads as Saturday FT, not as a SaaS landing.

2. Brand Voice

Adjectives: Observational, weighted, slightly literary, contemplative, precise. Voice anchor: Gladwell — the editorial / noticer voice. Magazine prose. Anecdote-then-pivot. Opens on a specific scene with a real person and a real moment, pulls the reader into the abstraction through it. Full fingerprint in anti-slop-copy/references/voices.md. Voice sample:

On a Wednesday in February 2017, a clinical-stage oncology company in South San Francisco closed a Series B led by a top-tier institutional fund. The deal was oversubscribed; the term sheet had been on the table for six weeks. What the founder remembered later, though, was not the lead investor or the round size. It was the smaller check on the second page of the cap table. The pharma. The strategic. The line that read Taiho Ventures in eight-point font.

What interests us about a Series B is rarely the round itself. The institutionals do the work of pricing it; the science either holds up in diligence or it doesn't. The interesting part is the line below the lead — the global pharmaceutical company that has signed off on the molecule before any of the obvious buyers have. By the time the asset reaches Phase II, that line has done more for the company's optionality than the dollar amount it represented.

Says:

"What interests us about [X] is rarely the [obvious thing]." — Gladwell's framing move; foregrounds the counterintuitive.
"The line below the lead." — Taiho's positional truth, said plainly. Strategic capital sits underneath institutional capital on the cap table; the page reads the geography literally.
"By the time the asset reaches Phase II…" — long-horizon framing; the voice is comfortable looking three years out, because Taiho is.

Avoids:

premier — corporate filler that appears in the brief itself; the voice refuses it.
ecosystem — biotech-VC stock vocabulary; means nothing once the reader has read it twice.
value-add — VC stock vocabulary, also in the brief; says less than what the page would say without it.

Sample sentences:

On the cap table, Taiho is the line below the lead. For the founder, that line is sometimes worth more than the check it represents — a global pharmaceutical company has already signed off on the molecule before the obvious buyers have seen it.

3. Color Palette & Roles

Mode: Light only. The salmon-cream paper is the brand's first identity move and the page never inverts. Dominant: #FFF1E5 (--salmon-broadsheet-paper) — page background, the full salmon-cream field. Accent: #E31B13 (--salmon-broadsheet-red) — Taiho Red, used sparingly: section markers, anniversary mark, the single "filed" tag. Never as a fill. Surfaces: #FAE9DC (--salmon-broadsheet-paper-deep) — slightly more saturated salmon for inset blocks; #0A0A0A (--salmon-broadsheet-ink) — body type and rules; #E8C8B5 (--salmon-broadsheet-rule) — column rule lines and fold-line borders. Notes: No gradients. Color is set in flat blocks. Taiho Yellow (#FABE00) and Taiho Sepia (#8A532C) are reserved for the masthead lockup only — they do not appear in body content. Black is the workhorse; red is the punctuation.

4. Typography Rules

Headline font: Frank Ruhl Libre — https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Frank+Ruhl+Libre:wght@500;700;900&display=swap — weights 500, 700, 900. Body font: Source Serif 4 — https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Source+Serif+4:ital,opsz,wght@0,8..60,400;0,8..60,600;1,8..60,400&display=swap — weights 400, 600, italic 400. Caption / dateline / metadata font: JetBrains Mono — https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=JetBrains+Mono:wght@400;500&display=swap — weights 400, 500. Pairing principle: High-contrast transitional serif headline + low-contrast text serif body + monospace for the broadsheet metadata layer (datelines, bylines, page references). Three families, each with a distinct job. Weight extremes: 900 for the masthead and lede headline; 400 for body. Weight does the contrast work, not size jumps. Size scale: H1 4.5rem, H2 2.75rem, H3 1.625rem, body 1.0625rem (17px), caption 0.8125rem. Max font sizes per page: 3. Banned (do not use): Inter, Roboto, Open Sans, Lato, Space Grotesk, system stacks, any geometric sans, Playfair Display (over-decorative), Merriweather (too web-default).

5. Layout & Density

Grid: Four-column broadsheet. Above the fold: a masthead bar (Vol. X, No. 1, dateline) + a dominant lede column (3 of 4 columns wide) carrying the video plate and lede deck + a single subsidiary column. Below the fold: traditional 4-column dispatch grid, with stories occupying 1–3 columns each. Container max-width: 1320px. Section rhythm: Dense-then-airy. The front page is busy; feature articles below open up to single-column long-form (max-width ~680px) with generous leading. Min container padding: 24px (mobile), 48px (desktop). Asymmetry / overlap commitments: The video plate breaks into the deck of the lede headline by ~20px, the way a halftone plate sometimes overlapped the deck in old broadsheet print. Section masthead rules are double-rules with a thin space between, not single rules.

6. Atmosphere & Media

Hero treatment: Committed solid — the salmon paper. The video plate sits inset on the paper, not as a hero background. Atmospheric layers: Very faint paper noise/grain (5–8% opacity, fine), thin column rules (--salmon-broadsheet-rule), a horizontal fold-line at the top below the masthead bar. No drop shadows, no gradients. Shadow style: None. Paper does not have shadow. Media stance: Video-led. A single ambient film loop (10–20s, no audio, no edits beyond a slow camera move or a slow rack focus) sits in the lede plate. Subsidiary content is type-only or uses small captioned still photographs treated as halftone-style insets. Stance reasoning: The brief explicitly asked for one concept that leverages video. Salmon Broadsheet is that one — but it stages video the way a broadsheet stages a press photograph: framed, captioned, contained inside a column grid. The cinematic register is real, but the page is paper.

7. Do's and Don'ts

Do:

Treat the video as a plate on paper — thin keyline frame, typeset caption beneath, contained inside a column.
Use Taiho Red as a single-use structural accent: section marker, anniversary mark, "filed" tag. Never as a fill, never as a button color.
Use datelines and bylines as page architecture: MENLO PARK — MAY 2026 set in monospace caps, treated as a structural element of the layout.
Use sentence-case multi-line decks under headlines, separated by thin double-rules.
Use tabular monospace numerals for portfolio metadata (round size, year, stage).
Hold the salmon paper as the page background under everything; never invert to white or to dark mode.
Use first-person CTAs in Gladwell register: "Read the case for Cullinan Pearl", "See what closed in 2024".

Don't:

Use Inter, Roboto, Open Sans, Lato, system stacks, Space Grotesk, or geometric sans.
Use full-bleed video, cinematic hero backgrounds, or page-wide motion. The video is a plate.
Use white page backgrounds. The salmon paper is the brand.
Use sans serif for body type. Body is always Source Serif 4.
Use rounded corners. Broadsheet is rectangular.
Use drop shadows, glow effects, or any 3D rendering.
Use the three-up icon-card feature grid.
Use hamburger nav on desktop — the masthead bar carries the navigation.
Write CTAs like "Get started", "Sign up", "Learn more".

8. Agent Prompt Guide

For any agent reading this file:

Read this DESIGN.md in full before writing any code, copy, or styling for 15-salmon-broadsheet-cvc.
Treat sections 1–7 as canonical truth. Don't override them inline.
Reject any change that violates the Don'ts in section 7. Surface the conflict to the user rather than silently picking one side.
If the user is asking for something this DESIGN.md doesn't cover, propose an addition to this file rather than introducing the decision in component code.
If the user is asking to change something in this file, route the request to columbus-design-md-builder rather than editing the file inline.
When sections conflict: section 7 (Don'ts) wins over everything; section 1 (Anchor) wins over sections 3–6; section 2 (Voice) is independent.

9. Notes & References

Created: 2026-05-01 Last updated: 2026-05-01 Source URL: https://www.taihoventures.com/ (legacy site — being replaced; not visually authoritative) External references:

Taiho corporate brand book: research/Taiho-ventures-basic-branding-v0.pdf (logo, Sepia/Red/Yellow brand colors)
Site brief v4: research/TOI2601_TVL Site Brief_v4.docx (audience, mandate, tone, peer references)
Peer references for institutional VC register: SR One, MPM BioImpact, GV Life Sciences, 5AM, Third Rock
FT Weekend digital edition (the salmon paper, the broadsheet grid)

Additions log:

2026-05-01: Initial DESIGN.md captured by columbus-design-md-builder. Voice anchor (Gladwell) selected via anti-slop-copy.

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