Lexicon
The vocabulary is a design decision, made in December 2025: naming things correctly changes how you build them.
These terms are canonical
the code, the docs and the garden all speak this language.
important note to self
Garden is the first product of the Standard, Reveal is the second one. The lexicon should only list Standard knowledge. Garden knowledge must be in its 1.1-invitation
Structural Naming Conventions
All system tokens and configuration keys must use strictly lowercase kebab-case. This invariant guarantees cross-compatibility between CSS variables, JavaScript object keys, and Markdown frontmatter.
The ecosystem #garden ishh
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Garden | standard.garden — the place where writing lives |
| Standard | The specification: tokens, temperaments, the frontmatter convention. Documented here, on stnd.build |
| Design | Design system |
| Press | The rendering engine: raw markdown in, typeset page out |
| Mycelium | The intelligence underground: backlinks plus semantically related notes. It reads, it never writes. |
| Gate | The command palette — type :: anywhere |
modules
Fonts
Layout
Astro
Cloudflare
The lifecycle #garden
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Annual | An anonymous note — blooms fast, lives 7 days, returns to the earth. Lives at /a/… |
| Perennial | A member’s note — deep roots, survives winter. Lives at /@username/… |
| Compost | The daily return to the soil: expired notes are permanently removed, storage included |
| Gravity | The weight of a note: density plus citations. The tallest trees rise above the scrub |
| Citation | The only social primitive: a note that links to another. No likes. No comments |
The visual matter
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| foreground / background | Text and surface — not “foreground/background”. Permanence and texture |
| accent | The accent — communication: links, alerts. Often International Orange |
| themes | One of six classical typographic personalities — the DNA of how a note expresses itself |
| Tokens | The design variables any note can set in frontmatter: color-light-accent, font-header, … |
The Six Themes
| Temperament | Persona | Aesthetic |
|---|---|---|
| Construct (International) | The Architect | Swiss grid, mathematical, precise |
| Blueprint (Technical) | The Mechanic | Monospace, safety orange |
| Letter (Humanist) | The Weaver | Warm serif, cream paper |
| Chronicle (Editorial) | The Writer | Newspaper, drop caps, authority |
| Treatise (Academic) | The Scholar | Journal style, sidenotes, math |
| Exhibit (Gallery) | The Curator | Museum, spatial, receded |
The anti-definitions #garden
Words we refuse to use, on purpose:
- Feed, timeline, followers — don’t exist here. There is the daily Bloom and the random walk.
- Content — here we say writing, or thinking. Content is produced for audiences; thinking is published.
- Engagement — the anti-metric. We measure Gravity, not clicks.
- AI-generated — the anti-mission. The Mycelium reads and relates; it never writes.