Theme candidates

State: open/active · Genre: survey

Screenshot evidence for the machined theme family: Platinum II, Instrument, and Carbide.

What was compared

Three candidate themes against Platinum, the baseline. Each candidate was captured on two surfaces, in both light and dark mode.

Home — the Family Workbench experience grid. The ordinary reading surface.
Lab — the design system lab. The page renders every --d-* token and every D* component; the shot covers the first viewport only: the live root state panel and the top of the theme and density matrix.

One more shot is global rather than per candidate. The theme picker is the Appearance pane in Settings, with all eight theme cards side by side.

The scope rail carries its own axis. Two treatments were captured for each candidate, on the home surface only.

Washed — the rail takes a pale tint from the theme’s accent family.
Chassis — the rail becomes a dark panel with the vault cards floating on it. This holds in light mode as well as dark.

The differences the shots isolate are ground values, text contrast, and accent hue. Platinum II puts the stage and cards at pure white and drops each rung of the text ladder one step darker. Instrument runs warm: cream chrome, ivory stage, a teal accent. Carbide runs cool and dark: a near-black stage in dark mode and the darkest chassis rail of the three. In dark mode all three candidates sink the stage below the chrome, so the cards sit above it.

File naming

<theme>-<surface>-<mode>.png
<theme>-rail-<treatment>-home-<mode>.png
theme-cards.png

<theme> is platinum, platinum-ii, instrument, or carbide.
<surface> is home or lab.
<mode> is light or dark.
<treatment> is washed or chassis.

Platinum has home and lab shots only. It is the baseline, not a candidate, so it has no rail shots. That gives 29 files.

What was concluded

Platinum II was chosen. It is the suite-wide default theme in @determined/ui.

All three candidates ship as real built-in themes on data-theme in:

packages/ts/ui/app/assets/css/tokens.css

That file also pins the chassis rail values per theme. Those are the hand-tuned values these shots show, not values derived from each theme’s palette. The generic derivation lands visibly away from them on both the rail ground and the rail ink.

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