Design decisions, held up to the light.

Every theme looks good on a landing page. A landing page is mostly whitespace, one photograph, and a headline set large enough that the type designer's opinion does all the work. The test that matters comes later, when somebody has to read nine hundred words of body copy on a Tuesday afternoon, and the only thing standing between them and closing the tab is whether the contrast holds and the measure is honest.

That is what this block is for. It is deliberately long, deliberately dense, and deliberately full of the things that break a design system: an inline link that has to be distinguishable from bold text without shouting, a run of emphasised words that should read as emphasis rather than a second heading, and a monospace token dropped mid-sentence where the baseline and the x-height rarely agree.

On the second level of hierarchy

Section headings inside an article have a harder job than page titles. They must separate without interrupting, which means they need enough weight to be found while scanning and little enough to be skipped while reading. Most systems solve this with size alone and end up with a heading that looks like a mistake.

If you cannot tell the heading from the paragraph at a squint, it is too quiet. If you notice it before you notice the paragraph, it is too loud.

And a third, for the stubborn cases

The third level exists for documents that genuinely need it and for nobody else. When it is needed, italics plus a modest weight bump usually beats another size step, because the size steps have already been spent.

• Body copy sits at a comfortable reading size, never smaller than sixteen pixels.
• Line height opens up as the measure widens — long lines need more air, not less.
• List markers take the accent color, which is the cheapest hierarchy available.
• Nothing in the reading column uses more than two colors of text.

There is a version of this that goes too far, where the type system becomes so refined that nobody can add a page to the site without a meeting. The useful stopping point is earlier than that: enough structure that the obvious choice is also the correct one, and enough slack that a new component does not require a new token.

What remains is the part no palette can supply. The words have to be worth the setting.