03 Chapter Three Surfaces & Signage
novigrad — internal review 07 / 18
Section 03.2 — Working Principles

Four rules we refuse to round off.

01

Concrete stays concrete.

No softening into cream or ivory. The page ground is documented formwork gray, the same surface the architects refused to paint over.

Surface · 1F1E1C
02

Orange does the pointing, teal does the answering.

One hot signage hue and one cool companion — never three, never four. If the page needs a third color it needs less content, not more palette.

Signal Pair
03

Grids carry the building, not the decoration.

Every block sits on a 12-column module borrowed from the Skopje reconstruction plates. We move things between columns, never between fractions of a column.

Module · 12-col
04

Geometric grotesque, always — no serifs, no scripts.

Work Sans for running text, Archivo for stamps and tags, Space Grotesk for the numbers. A single Univers-lineage voice from caption to headline.

Type · 3 cuts
This is the Yugoslav Socialist Modernism design system, applied by Curio Design — a design-style library for AI agents. Full Yugoslav Socialist Modernism guide → designbycurio.com/learn/yugoslav-surfaces-modernism-1965