For Designers

Fireside design is intent-first: define semantic tokens and let each engine map those tokens to platform capabilities.

Design in Fireside

Fireside does not mandate CSS, specific fonts, or a required theme file format. Instead, documents and engines share semantic expectations:

• readable structure
• consistent emphasis
• predictable contrast
• graceful adaptation across terminals

Token Essentials

Use these token intents as your base palette vocabulary:

Token	Intent
surface-primary	Primary background canvas
surface-secondary	Secondary panel surfaces
text-primary	Main readable text
text-secondary	Supporting labels and subtitles
text-muted	De-emphasized metadata
accent-primary	Focus, active, and key highlights
accent-secondary	Secondary emphasis
border-default	Borders and separators

iTerm2 Mapping Workflow

If your team starts from iTerm2 colors, map slots by intent:

1. Background Color → surface-primary
2. Foreground Color → text-primary
3. Selection Color → surface-secondary
4. Cursor Color → accent-primary

Then test legibility at 16-color and true-color terminal settings.

Layout Patterns

The protocol includes layout hints you can design against:

• default, center, fullscreen
• split-horizontal, split-vertical
• align-left, align-right
• focus-code, agenda, compare
• image-left, image-right

Design recommendation: define token states for each layout family rather than hard-coding page-specific colors.

Accessibility Checklist

• Maintain AA-level contrast intent for primary text.
• Use non-color affordances for branch selection and focus.
• Validate in low-color environments.
• Ensure dense code views remain readable in focus-code layouts.

Theme Source Flexibility

Engine implementations may load tokens from JSON, CLI flags, or platform-native settings. As a designer, focus on semantic token intent and contrast behavior, not storage syntax.