---
url: https://brand.okrado.com/start/principles/
title: Principles
description: The Record and the Loop, and the seven rules every Okrado surface follows.
kind: explanation
owner: Ghassen-Hizem
updated: 2026-11-03
review_by: 2027-02-28
audience:
  - designer
  - developer
  - agent
---

# Principles

> The Record and the Loop, and the seven rules every Okrado surface follows.

Okrado runs a company as a loop: objectives go down, agents act, results come back. Every action leaves a record, and the records are chained. The design language has two shapes for that, and nothing else is bold.

- **The Record** is a small, sharp, amber square. It is the newest entry, the thing a person approved, the head of the chain. It appears once per component and once per viewport.
- **The Loop** is a ring, drawn as a hairline in layouts and a heavy stroke in the mark. In a layout it shows real states, never decoration.

Everything else is quiet: paper and night, Archivo for the voice, Inter for the work, JetBrains Mono for evidence.

## The seven rules

1. **Evidence over adjectives.** Show the record, the number and the owner. A claim is a real screen, a real number with its source, or marked “Illustrative”.
2. **One accent, one job.** Amber marks the record. It is never a primary button, a link colour or decoration.
3. **Calm type, exact numbers.** Display type is medium weight and tightly tracked. Numbers are tabular. Hashes and ids are mono.
4. **Hairlines before shadows.** Structure is 1 px lines on a grid. A shadow means “this floats above the page”.
5. **Density is respect.** Product surfaces show real information at 13 to 14 px. Marketing surfaces breathe.
6. **Both themes are first-class.** Every surface is designed and reviewed in paper and night.
7. **Motion explains state.** Things move to show that a record was written, a loop closed or a panel opened. Reduced motion keeps a short fade and drops every move.

The full text is the design language, [Colour](https://brand.okrado.com/foundations/colour/), [Type](https://brand.okrado.com/foundations/type/) and the other foundations unpack it into tokens.