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Brand brief — Clay & Sky Taiho TOIDESIGN.md▸

DESIGN.md — Taiho Ventures (Clay & Sky / TOI Evolution)

Per-style brand authority for src/styles/26-clay-sky-taiho-toi/. 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: Modern Oncology Editorial (Clay & Sky) — the agency's Taiho Ventures CVC redesign, re-skinned in the Taiho Oncology, Inc. (TOI) April-2026 brand redesign: Clay-grounded, Sky-lit, Ocean-accented. Where the Hakushi sibling reads as a paper-and-ink quarterly, this concept reads as a published institution — warm Clay header bar over a Sky-mint canvas, soft 16–20px rounded cards (Sky on Pebble, Pebble on Sky), Ocean teal pills as the call-to-action vocabulary. The TOI deck's three-word ask — Heartfelt Connection · Inspired Innovation · Elevated Experience — is the cadence the page is built to deliver. Secondary remix: Editorial Modernism × clinical-warm institutional — Lora display headlines for clinical credibility and human warmth, IBM Plex Sans for everything else for geometric clarity and trust. Kanji 創台分診 are retained from the Taiho concept set as four reverent chapter marks, but rendered in Ocean teal on Sky rather than vermillion on cream — matching the TOI palette discipline. Reference brands: Taiho Oncology, Inc. (the TOI April-2026 corporate website redesign — design language, palette, button vocabulary) × ETH Zürich (clinical institutional warmth) × MIT Technology Review (biotech credibility, card rhythm) Visual atmosphere: Clay grounds the page; Sky floats it. The rhythm is Clay band → Sky surface → Pebble surface → Sky surface → Clay band — color zoning replaces hairlines as the structural device. Cards are softly rounded (16px on small surfaces, 20px on the largest). Buttons are Ocean-teal pills with a white right-arrow chip. The 10-year anniversary signal is a single Energy-yellow ribbon stripe above the header carrying "創立十周年 / TEN YEARS / 2016 — 2026" — not a hanko, not a watermark; a flat ribbon that picks up the TOI palette's reserved Energy accent. Photography is almost banned (see §6); the page does its work through palette discipline, type, and rounded-card rhythm.

2. Brand Voice

Adjectives: patient, plainspoken, warm, institutional, sixty-years-old, partner-shaped Voice anchor: Orwell with a softer collar — the craftsman voice retained from the Hakushi sibling, but warmed by the TOI redesign's "heartfelt connection" mandate. Plain words, exact verbs, sentences that earn their length, and a willingness to use the word alongside instead of pretending capital is impersonal. The brand sounds like an LP letter from a fund whose parent company spent sixty years closer to patients than to markets. Voice sample:

Patient capital for the scientists rebuilding medicine itself. We back early-stage founders developing first-in-class therapeutics, novel platform biology, and the modalities that will define the next decade of oncology, immunology, and rare disease. We hold for the long arc — and we walk alongside the operating teams that translate science into therapies patients can actually receive.

Says:

"Patient capital for the scientists rebuilding medicine itself."
"We hold for the long arc."
"We walk alongside the operating teams."
"The pledge is sixty years old. It is also what governs every term sheet we issue."
"Heartfelt. Inspired. Elevated." (the TOI-deck three-word anchor; allowed as a single trio set, never as separate marketing taglines)

Avoids:

"Premier" / "leading" / "world-class" — the parent company's R&D record doesn't need a superlative
"Ecosystem" / "platform" as marketing nouns — platforms may appear only when the page literally means platform biology
"Empower" / "unlock" / "transform" — the brand earns trust by being matter-of-fact
"Patients are our first priority" — that line belongs to Taiho Oncology, Inc.'s operating-company brand. The CVC voice borrows the TOI palette, not its operating-company copy.

Sample sentences:

The pledge is sixty years old. It is also what governs every term sheet we issue, every board seat we take, and every founder we choose to walk alongside.

Four areas, one filter — does this work compound the science Taiho has spent decades building?

3. Color Palette & Roles

Mode: light Source: Sampled directly from the TOI April-2026 brand deck (research/toi-may-2026/Taiho-TOI-branding-may-2026-compressed.pdf, page 5 — "Suggested Updates To Color Palette"). The seven names — Clay, Earth, Pebble, Ocean, Sky, Energy, Focus — are TOI's, not invented here.

Dominant: #8a532c (--toi-clay) — header bar, footer bar, hero band, the brown wordmark, a button-of-last-resort. The "stabilizing force for those living with cancer" anchor; everything in the page is calibrated against it. Anchor (deep): #4a2e18 (--toi-earth) — body type, headlines on light surfaces, footer text on Clay. The dark anchor that keeps the page legible. Accent: #077e8c (--toi-ocean) — the Ocean teal. Section headlines on Sky, link color, pill-button fill, kanji chapter marks (note: kanji moves from vermillion to Ocean in this concept), pull-quote glyphs, "View all 24 →" tags. Reserved as accent — never as a section background. Surfaces:

#e9fffd (--toi-sky) — the page's primary breathing surface; hero canvas, section grounds, card backgrounds. The "high-legibility background" that is the TOI deck's structural innovation.
#eaddd5 (--toi-pebble) — alternating section ground and the Team / Pledge / Portfolio cell surface; the warm-tan secondary that gives the page a Clay-leaning warmth without darkening it.
#ffffff (--toi-white) — only inside cards on a Pebble surface, when a third tier of stratification is needed (e.g., stat cards). Never used as a section ground.

Punctuation accents (rationed):

#fbbf00 (--toi-energy) — the Energy yellow. Permitted only as: (a) the anniversary ribbon above the header (single instance), (b) a single 4px left-rule on the hero pull lede, and (c) a one-time numeric callout (e.g., the "$400M" stat). Banned as fill, banned as a button, banned as a card surface.
#e41b14 (--toi-focus) — the Focus red. Permitted only as: (a) a "live" / "new" tag on at most two portfolio cells, and (b) the active nav state's underline. Banned everywhere else.

Notes: No gradients. Drop shadows are explicitly permitted on cards (see §5) but only as a 0/2px/12px/-2px Earth at 6% — the softest possible separation; flashy shadows are out. Rounded corners are the structural language: 8px on inputs, 12px on small chips, 16px on most cards, 20px on the largest hero-adjacent surfaces. Color is the zoning device — bands of Clay/Sky/Pebble/Sky/Clay carry the page's rhythm in lieu of the hairline rules used by the Hakushi sibling.

4. Typography Rules

Headline font: Lora — https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Lora:ital,wght@0,400;0,500;0,600;1,400&display=swap — weights 400, 500, 600, 400-italic. The TOI deck specifies Lora as Display Font verbatim; this concept honors that selection 1:1. Body font: IBM Plex Sans — https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=IBM+Plex+Sans:wght@400;500;600&display=swap — weights 400, 500, 600. The TOI deck specifies IBM Plex Sans as the body font; this concept honors that selection 1:1. Plex Sans (not Inter) is the differentiator from the Hakushi sibling. Meta font: IBM Plex Mono — https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=IBM+Plex+Mono:wght@400;500&display=swap — weights 400, 500. Used for section markers ("—— No. 01 / Overview"), stat labels, footer column headers. Plex Mono is chosen over JetBrains Mono so the meta cadence matches the body system. Kanji font: Noto Serif JP — https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Noto+Serif+JP:wght@400;500;700&display=swap — weight 400. Used only for the four sector kanji (創台分診) at 48px, rendered in Ocean teal (not vermillion). Kanji are retained as the thesis-grid chapter marks. Pairing principle: Three-font system — Lora (humanist serif, clinical credibility) for editorial gravitas, IBM Plex Sans (geometric sans, neutrality + accessibility) for body legibility, IBM Plex Mono (geometric mono) for meta cadence. The kanji is a fourth, quarantined to four glyphs. Weight extremes: 400 (everything that can hold it) vs 500 (the rare emphatic line) and 600 (the headline of the page only). Italics (Lora 400-italic) carry emphasis instead of bold. Size scale: H1 96px / H2 44px / H3 22px / lede-l 19px / body 14–15px / stat-number 56px / meta 10–11px (with 0.14em letter-spacing, uppercase). Plex Sans renders ~6% wider than Inter at the same size; the 14–15px body keeps line-length comfortable on Sky-card column widths. Max font sizes per page: 3 (Lora display, Plex Sans body, Plex Mono meta — kanji is set in Noto Serif JP but only at one size) Banned (do not use): Roboto, Open Sans, Lato, system stacks, Space Grotesk, Source Sans, Geist, Manrope, Playfair Display, Inter (reserved for the Hakushi sibling — using it here would collapse the differentiation)

5. Layout & Density

Grid: Wide-canvas editorial within a card-zoned page. Header/footer bands are full-bleed Clay. Section bands inside the page alternate Sky → Pebble → Sky → Pebble (color is the rhythm). Each section uses 80px horizontal padding (no narrow centered max-width). Hero sets text in a 1100px-max two-column lede (1fr 1fr, 80px gap) on a Sky ground with an Energy-yellow 4px left rule on the lede. Stats are a 4-up grid of white rounded cards (16px radius, 0/2/12/-2 Earth-6% shadow) on a Pebble band. Thesis is a 320px-fixed left margin column for the section marker + heading, paired with a 2×2 Sky-card grid (16px radius) on the right; each card carries an Ocean kanji glyph + index + title + body. Portfolio is a 4-col grid of 16px-radius Sky cards on a Pebble band, each cell a 1px Pebble border at rest, the at-most-two "live" cells flagged with a Focus-red 11px tag. Pledge is asymmetric 1fr / 1.4fr on a Clay band — the logomark held small in the left margin, white-on-Clay quote in the larger right column.

Container max-width: none — sections are full-bleed at 80px gutters. Lede prose caps at 1100px. Cards inside full-bleed bands cap at a 1280px container.

Section rhythm: spacious, color-banded. Each section breathes (100–140px vertical padding) and its band carries a single palette role: Sky for breathing-room sections (hero, thesis, portfolio); Pebble for warm-anchor sections (stats, team); Clay for institutional-frame sections (header, pledge, footer). Stats is the only tight rhythm and it lives between two airy sections to give the page a heartbeat — same role as in the Hakushi sibling.

Min container padding: 24px (mobile), 80px (desktop) Asymmetry / overlap commitments: The thesis section's left column is fixed-width (320px) while the right column expands — deliberately uneven. The pledge section's logomark sits small in the left column at top, while the quote takes the larger right column — the visual weight is reversed from what you'd expect, which is the point. No overlapping elements, no z-stacked decoration. Cards do not overlap; they sit cleanly in their grids. Card system: 16px radius is the default. 20px is reserved for the single largest surface (hero-adjacent, if any). 12px is the chip / pill / tag radius. 8px is the input field radius. Drop-shadow is 0 2px 12px -2px rgba(74, 46, 24, 0.06) — the softest possible Earth-tinted separation; never larger.

6. Atmosphere & Media

Hero treatment: Solid --toi-sky (#e9fffd) with an Energy-yellow 4px left rule on the lede column and the Clay-band header above. Committed-solid, intentional. No gradient. Atmospheric layers: Color zoning between sections (Sky / Pebble / Clay bands) replaces hairline rules. Section markers ("—— No. 01 / Overview") with a literal em-dash run-in carry over from the sibling cadence. Kanji glyphs (創台分診) as decorative chapter marks in the thesis grid, Ocean teal at 48px. No noise, no grain, no halftone. Shadow style: Soft-card shadow only — 0 2px 12px -2px rgba(74, 46, 24, 0.06). Permitted on white-on-Pebble stat cards and Sky-on-Pebble thesis/portfolio cards. Banned everywhere else (no shadows on the header, on the footer, on buttons, or on the pledge band). Even Sky-on-Sky elements use a 1px Pebble border instead of a shadow. Media stance: type-led, with anniversary ribbon, hover-only portfolio logos, and small partner portrait plates in the Team register Stance reasoning: The TOI mock leans heavily on warm patient/lab photography (lab benches, hugs, headshots). That photography belongs to the operating company's brand, not the venture arm — using it on the CVC site would pretend Taiho Ventures is the operating company. So this concept inherits the Hakushi sibling's type-led discipline and applies the TOI palette + typography + card rhythm, not its photography. Four narrow image exceptions:

The parent Taiho Communication Mark at small reverent scales only (header 36px, footer 24px, pledge ~140px) — never enlarged.
The 10-year anniversary ribbon — a single full-bleed Energy-yellow stripe above the header, 36px tall, carrying "創立十周年 / TEN YEARS · 2016 — 2026" in Plex Mono ink. Replaces the Hakushi sibling's circular hanko; the flat ribbon is a closer fit to the TOI deck's button/chip vocabulary.
Portfolio company logomarks revealed only via the cursor-tracking hover preview card — never rendered at rest in the register. Same mechanic as the Hakushi sibling, restyled to a Sky card with a 1px Pebble border (no shadow on the preview card itself; the cell underneath does the lifting).
Partner portrait plates in the Team register only — small (~140–160px square), ranged top of each register cell. Rendered in muted-duotone tinted to the Clay/Earth palette (warm sepia, not cool), so portraits read as Clay-paper proofs rather than glossy TOI-style headshots. Same scale and discipline as the Hakushi sibling; only the duotone tint shifts to match this concept's palette.

No editorial photography, no lab imagery, no hero-scale or feature-scale portraits. The TOI mock's full-bleed photo hero is explicitly rejected for this brand — that treatment is right for the operating company; it would dilute the venture arm.

7. Do's and Don'ts

Do:

Set every section break with a Plex Mono marker: —— No. 0X / <Section>. The em-dash run-in is the cadence (carried from the Hakushi sibling).
Zone sections by palette: Sky for breathing-room sections (hero, thesis, portfolio), Pebble for warm-anchor sections (stats, team), Clay for institutional-frame bands (header, pledge, footer). Color is the structural device.
Reserve Ocean (#077e8c) for: section headlines on Sky, link color, pill-button fill, kanji glyphs, pull-quote glyphs, meta-tag color. Never as a section ground.
Reserve Energy (#fbbf00) for: the anniversary ribbon, the hero lede's 4px left rule, and one numeric callout. Banned as fill, button, or card surface.
Reserve Focus (#e41b14) for: a "live" tag on at most two portfolio cells, and the active nav state's underline. Banned everywhere else.
Render buttons as Ocean-teal pills (12px radius), white Plex Sans 500 label, white right-arrow chip — matching the TOI deck's button vocabulary.
Render the four sectors with kanji 創 (Drug Discovery), 台 (Platform Tech), 分 (Spin-outs), 診 (Devices & Dx) in Noto Serif JP at 48px in Ocean teal (not vermillion). The kanji ARE the icons.
Use Lora 400-italic for emphasis, never bold weights. "medicine itself." is the canonical example.
Soft-round every card surface: 16px default, 20px largest, 12px chips, 8px inputs.
Use IBM Plex Sans for every non-display string (body, nav, captions, meta-adjacent labels). Plex Mono for cadence markers only.
Write copy in the LP-letter register — patient, plainspoken, sixty-years-old. CTAs read "Submit a company →" and "Read the investment thesis", not "Get started".

Don't:

Use Inter, Roboto, Space Grotesk, or system stacks for any string (Lora display / Plex Sans body / Plex Mono meta only). Inter is reserved for the Hakushi sibling — using it here collapses the differentiation.
Use any gradient anywhere — heroes, buttons, cards, accents, transparency washes.
Add shadows beyond the soft-card shadow defined in §6. No deep elevation, no glow, no inner shadows.
Use the three-up icon-card feature grid — the thesis is a 2×2 Sky-card kanji grid.
Use stock photography, lab imagery, or hero/feature-scale portraiture. The image classes permitted are: (a) the parent Taiho Communication Mark at small reverent scales only (header / footer / pledge); (b) the anniversary ribbon (single instance, above the header); (c) portfolio company logomarks revealed only via the cursor-tracking hover preview, never rendered at rest in the register; (d) partner portrait plates in the Team register only — small (~140–160px square), warm-sepia duotone tinted to the Clay/Earth palette. Portraits are scoped to Team and may not appear in the hero, the pledge, the footer, or any other section. Reject any reviewer pushback that asks for a TOI-style full-bleed patient/lab photo hero — that treatment belongs to the operating company's brand.
Add hover-glow, hover-translate-y, or any animated reveal on links and CTAs beyond a simple opacity/color shift. The portfolio cursor preview is the explicit exception — a single ~140ms opacity fade-in on a fixed-position framed card.
Write CTAs like "Get started" / "Sign up" / "Learn more" — use first-person, voice-shaped CTAs ("Submit a company →", "Read the investment thesis").
Use bold (700+) for emphasis in body copy — italics (Lora 400-italic) carry emphasis.
Borrow operating-company copy from the TOI mock ("Patients are our first priority", "Mission video", "Phase 1/2/3 pipeline", "Patient and caregiver stories"). The mock's palette and card rhythm are the inspiration; its copy and information architecture are not. The CVC site's information architecture stays: Hero → Stats → Thesis → Portfolio → Team → Pledge → Footer.
Use vermillion (#c8472b / #ef4123) — that color belongs to the Hakushi and Vermillion siblings. This concept's emphasis color is Ocean teal.

8. Agent Prompt Guide

For any agent reading this file:

Read this DESIGN.md in full before writing any code, copy, or styling for 26-clay-sky-taiho-toi.
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. (Common conflict: a request to "make it more visual" — the right answer is to push palette, kanji, or rhythm, not to add operating-company-style photography.)
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.
Sibling style note: this is the Clay & Sky / TOI-evolution sibling of the Taiho concept set. Sibling styles 19-cinematic-taiho-cvc, 22-sumi-brushwork-cvc, 23-vermillion-taiho-cvc, 24-labnote-taiho-cvc, and 25-hakushi-taiho-cvc cover other directions for the same brand — do not borrow visual decisions from them. Each Taiho sibling is its own world. The closest sibling structurally is 25-hakushi-taiho-cvc (same information architecture, same kanji thesis, same partner-portrait register) — but 26-clay-sky-taiho-toi swaps the cream-paper-and-ink discipline for the TOI palette's color-banded card rhythm. Don't collapse this concept into the Hakushi treatment.

9. Notes & References

Created: 2026-05-08 Last updated: 2026-05-08 Source URL: https://taihoventures.com/ (the brand) · seeded by research/toi-may-2026/Taiho-TOI-branding-may-2026-compressed.pdf (TOI corporate website redesign deck, April 2026) and research/toi-may-2026/Taiho-TOI-website-mock-may-2026-compressed.pdf (TOI mock — used for visual inspiration only; copy / IA / code intentionally not borrowed) External references:

Lora specimen: https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Lora
IBM Plex Sans specimen: https://fonts.google.com/specimen/IBM+Plex+Sans
IBM Plex Mono specimen: https://fonts.google.com/specimen/IBM+Plex+Mono
Noto Serif JP specimen: https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Noto+Serif+JP
Taiho Pharmaceutical corporate pledge: "We strive to improve human health and contribute to a society enriched by smiles."
Logomark: phoenix in oval — yellow wing (#fdb913), red body (#ef4123), brown details (#845339), brown frame (#8c5938). The colors carry the brand; the Clay & Sky direction reserves Ocean teal as the page's accent and uses Energy yellow only for the anniversary ribbon and a single hero rule.

Palette source extraction:

Clay #8a532c, Earth #4a2e18, Pebble #eaddd5, Ocean #077e8c, Sky #e9fffd, Energy #fbbf00, Focus #e41b14 — sampled directly from page 5 of the TOI April-2026 brand deck.

Additions log:

2026-05-08: Initial DESIGN.md captured by columbus-design-md-builder, seeded by the TOI April-2026 brand deck and website mock. Concept established as the Clay & Sky / TOI-evolution sibling of the Taiho concept set: Lora + IBM Plex Sans typography per the TOI deck verbatim, color-banded card rhythm (Sky / Pebble / Clay) replacing the Hakushi sibling's hairline-and-ink discipline, Ocean teal as the new accent (replacing vermillion), kanji 創台分診 retained but re-tinted Ocean. CVC information architecture (Hero → Stats → Thesis → Portfolio → Team → Pledge → Footer) preserved from the existing Taiho sibling set; TOI mock copy and IA explicitly not borrowed.

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