The Ordnance Survey one-inch sheet is a seven-colour lithograph printed on warm buff wove paper: water blue, woodland green, burnt-sienna roads, brown hachures and red contours laid over black engraved linework. Nothing in it is decorative. Every tint is a plate, every plate carries information, and the slight misregistration between them is the honest evidence of how the sheet was made.

This system takes that discipline into interface work. A wide paper margin frames the content the way the neatline frames the map face. Type alternates Times-style serif and Gill-style sans by feature class. Relief is ruled, never photographic — contour lines and directional hachure strokes, not soft shadow.