Changelog

23 changes to the standard so far. An app compares its own stamp against this one.

Version

9858e99a

Picking a change up

Setting an app up happens once, so do not repeat it. An app whose design/STANDARD.md shows a version other than 9858e99a is behind. Replace <slug> with that app's design, or open the design and use the panel there, which fills it in.

Prompt for the agent

The Dashcore design standard has changed. Pick the change up in this app, which is already on the Dashcore standard.

1. Run `composer require "dashcore/design-kit:^4.0"` first. The components and the audit rules arrive with the package.
2. Run `php artisan design:update <slug>`. It re-applies the design, says whether the standard moved, and audits this app against the rules as they now read.
3. Read design/CHANGELOG.md. Each entry says whether it is a relaxation, which needs nothing, or a tightening, which means screens have drifted. It also says whether the audit can check it. Where the audit cannot, look for those screens yourself, because nothing will report them.
4. Work the audit findings the way design/MIGRATION.md says: one screen per commit, most-used first, checking each with `php artisan design:audit <file>` before committing. Do not invent a component or a colour the standard lacks; leave it and say so.
5. End with a report: the standard version before and after, the audit count before and after, the screens changed, and anything left and why.

Do not re-run the setup. The adapter is installed, the sign-in layout is in place, and the CLAUDE snippet is already in CLAUDE.md.

Or by hand, in the target repo

composer require "dashcore/design-kit:^4.0"
php artisan design:update <slug>

What changed in the standard

Newest first. Every entry says what moved and whether an app already on the standard has to do anything.

A relaxation lets an app do something it could not before. Nothing that was right becomes wrong, so there is nothing to fix.

A tightening makes something that was allowed no longer allowed. Existing screens drift the moment it lands. Where the audit can check it, the line says so, and php artisan design:audit will find those screens for you.

The full reasoning for each decision is in the cut sheet in the design repository. This file is the short version an app needs.

16 September 2026

A Flux button at size="sm" is a tap target finding. Tightening, and the audit checks it. 05 has always said a touch target is never under 36px, and the rule caught size="xs" but not sm. Flux's button heights are h-10 at 40px for base, h-8 at 32px for sm and h-6 at 24px for xs, so only base clears the floor. The old rule was also inconsistent with itself: a hand-written h-8 button was already reported while the Flux size that renders as h-8 was not. 05 now says outright that base is the only usable size. Measured across five apps here, it finds 63 in one and 68 in another, which are the same product, and nothing at all in the other three. An inline action in a dense row is a full-height button or it is not a button.

Three places where 06 and Flux disagreed are settled. Checked against Flux 2.19 rather than against the note that recorded them, and one of the three turned out not to be a disagreement at all.

Section headings get a component. Tightening, and the audit checks it. flux:heading cannot make either heading role in 03: size="lg" renders 16px at weight 500 where the section heading is 18px at 600, and size="xl" renders 24px at 500 where the page title is 24px at 600. The weight is wrong at every size. Its sizes are plain utility classes on the element, so passing a class of your own leaves two competing and the stylesheet order decides rather than you. x-ds::section-heading is the role: 18px, 600, body face, for a section heading, a card title or a modal title. It takes the body face and never the second one, because 03 gives the second face the page title, the sign-in headline and stat values, and bars a serif from anything under 24px. The audit reports flux:heading size="lg". The default size is 14px at 500, which is the UI emphasis role, and Flux gets that one right.

callout.button never existed. No rule changed, 06 named a component that is not there. Flux ships four callout parts, index, heading, text and link, and Flux Pro adds none. Anyone following 06 literally got a Blade error. The action on a callout is callout.link, an inline underlined link, and "at most one action" is unchanged.

The toast width was not a disagreement. No rule changed. 06 has never specified a toast width, so Flux's 384px, dropping to 320px below sm inside a group, contradicts nothing. The number is now written into 06 so it does not get reopened as one.

15 September 2026

Public pages are governed rather than exempted. Tightening, and the audit checks most of it. Section 13 is new. A landing page used to carry @ds-audit-ignore-file, which was never a decision: nobody had written the rules, so the audit was told to look away, and from inside a repo an exemption and a rule look the same. 13 says what carries over from the app standard (the roles, both registers, the pairing, the spacing scale, the icon set, the three widths, the voice) and what does not (the shell, density, x-ds::page-header). It adds the one type step the app scale does not have, a hero at 48px, capped there. It also names ten things a public page never does, each of them something a generator reaches for when nobody has said otherwise: gradients as backgrounds or on text, emoji in headings, a badge above the hero, glassmorphism, grain over a gradient, three icon boxes in a row, scroll fades and cursor beams, serif italic accents, and copy that would survive swapping the product name. A public page now says @ds-public instead of opting out, which keeps every rule except the page title, since a hero is not a page header. Laravel's welcome.blade.php needs no marker. Swapping the two markers on an existing landing page will produce findings, and that is the point.

14 September 2026

An app can ask whether the standard moved. No rule changed. php artisan design:check --against=<slug> compares the stamp in design/STANDARD.md with the version the tool is publishing now, and says which. Until this, design:apply was the only thing that reported it, so finding out meant re-applying, which is a change made to answer a question. It writes nothing and never changes the exit code, because half the entries in this file are relaxations with nothing to do.

The Flux table is brought onto 06. Tightening, and the audit cannot check it, but you get it for nothing on the next composer update. 06 has always said the head row sits on sunken at 12px in muted, with body rows at 14px and the row height from density. Flux ships a 14px head in body colour with no fill, so every app using flux:table drifted the same way, and the first agent build of a new product corrected it per screen and then said plainly that it belonged in the adapter. It is now in the applied CSS block, which is the same argument the badge override rests on: one fix every app inherits, rather than fifteen apps each fixing it differently. The rules sit outside any @layer, because unlayered styles beat Tailwind's utilities without !important, and a test checks they stay there.

Accent text is derived against the accent tint. Tightening, and the audit cannot check it, but design:check now can. Found by the first agent build of a new product. 04 claimed accent text "always passes contrast", which was false: accent-content was derived against the page, and nothing measured it against the tint 04 itself puts behind every selected row and active list item. Measured across all eight designs, 10 of 16 pairs failed, worst 3.40:1 in dark against a floor of 4.5, while every design reported passing. It is now derived against the tint, which is the worst of the three surfaces accent text lands on, so passing there means passing on page and surface too. Secondary text on that tint takes text-muted-on-sunken, the same role a status tint already used. Both pairs are measured in the tool and in the package's copy of the gate, so 46 pairs are checked per design instead of 42. Every design still passes and most light values did not move; the dark values are lighter than before. This is the same fault as the status tint one below, in the same file, and it went unnoticed for longer.

Form fields break at md, not lg. Relaxation, correcting the entry below on the day it was written. 12 first said forms are one column below lg, which would have made a tablet show one narrow column with empty space beside it. Building the mockups against the new canvas showed it immediately. Fields are one column below md and may be two from md, where each column still holds a label and its control without wrapping. The phone case, which was the point, is unchanged.

The fleet has named widths. Tightening, and the audit cannot check it. Section 12 is new. The standard described what happens on a small screen four times and never said how small: section 02 said "on mobile" three times and named a breakpoint once. Three people read that and pick three widths, which is drift written into the standard itself. The scale is Tailwind's, because Flux is built on it and naming our own would mean fighting a component library in every app. The fleet designs at three widths and not five: phone below md, tablet from md to below lg, desktop at lg and up. Nothing new happens above that, since 02 already caps content at 80rem. The sidebar is a drawer below lg and the top nav collapses below md, which differ on purpose, because five nav items fit across 768px and a 16rem sidebar beside content does not. Those three "on mobile" phrases in 02 now name their width. A table a customer reaches stops being a table below md; a staff-only table may scroll sideways instead, and which applies is a per-screen decision that belongs in that screen's commit message.

The tap target floor is checked. No rule changed, and the audit now checks it. Section 05 has always said a tap target is never under 36px, which is the compact control height, but nothing enforced it. The audit reports an interactive element sized under that by its own class attribute, and a Flux button at size="xs", which is about 24px. It reads the element's own classes rather than the line, so an icon at 20px inside a 40px button is not a finding. It found nothing on either app tested, so the fleet already clears the floor.

Email has a section. Tightening, and the audit cannot check it. Section 10 is new. Every app in the fleet was sending Laravel's default template, so a member got a portal built to this standard and then an email that looked like nothing to do with it. Email is the one surface where the rest of the standard cannot apply: no custom properties, no utility classes, no web fonts, no second typeface and no dark register. What carries over is the accent, the neutral scale, the voice and the structure, all of it in inline hex. The audit does not see mail templates, so a person has to look.

Error pages and first run have a section. Tightening, and the audit checks part of it. Section 11 is new. Laravel's own 404, 419, 429, 500 and 503 were untouched everywhere, which is a framework's page under a product's name, arriving at the moment somebody is already stuck. None of them uses the danger colour, because a red page tells somebody their data is gone. The audit walks resources/views/errors/ like any other view, so colour and spacing there are checked, but it cannot tell you the pages were never written.

A badge with no status is neutral. Tightening, and the audit checks it. Roles, plans, types, categories and any state the four status colours do not cover now take <x-ds::badge> with no status. Colour on a badge means status and nothing else. An unrecognised status renders neutral instead of falling back to info. A count is not a badge at all. The audit reports every flux:badge.

A count marker takes the accent. Tightening, and the audit checks it. An unread count on a nav item or a notification bell fills with the accent and uses on-accent text at text-xs. It is never red, because red says something has gone wrong and unread items have not. The audit reports a red fill as a colour off the roles.

Muted text on a status tint uses the 600 step. Tightening, not checkable by the audit. Section 04 allows a status tint behind a row, and muted text at the 500 step measures 4.35:1 on the danger tint, under the floor. Use text-(--ds-text-muted-on-sunken) on any tinted row. design:check now measures both tint pairs for every status, so a design cannot ship below the floor.

The empty state has a compact size. Relaxation, not checkable. size="compact" drops the 320 pixel minimum and the button, for a panel inside a split region. The full size is unchanged.

A navlist may appear in content. Relaxation, not checkable. A section with its own destinations, such as settings, may put one vertically beside the panel it switches, one level deep and with no nesting. It is a sub-navigation and never a second main nav.

An app without Flux Pro is on the standard. Relaxation, not checkable. Section 06 names a free stand-in for eleven of the nineteen Pro components, and the rule for each is the Pro rule unchanged. The Dashcore licence covers every site, so installing Pro is still the expected end state, but a site that has not yet is behind on an install rather than outside the rules.

The fleet is defined. No rule changed. The word appears throughout and was never explained, so the pack now says what it means and why fifteen sites is the test a rule has to pass.

12 September 2026

Zinc is the design, not drift. No rule changed, but the guidance was contradicting itself. design:apply redefines the whole zinc scale as the chosen neutral ramp, so zinc utilities already resolve to the design and the audit is right to ignore them. The migration guide used to list them among the rewrites, which made a clean file look dirty. Moving zinc onto the roles is optional polish, not a finding.

Public pages are exempted before the mechanical pass. No rule changed, an ordering bug in the migration guide. The pass used to run over everything first and exempt the public pages afterwards, so it rewrote the pages it was about to exclude.