Skip to main content

​
Appearance

Overdeck ships two complete, named design languages for the dashboard, and the choice between them is a single setting rather than a migration you have to absorb all at once.

​
The two themes

  • Ledger — the classic dense monitoring style: DM Sans for prose, SF Mono for technical identifiers (code, IDs, hashes — same as Broadsheet), a flat medium-weight cap on everything else, panel-first layout. The one exception is the “Overdeck” sidebar wordmark, set in Space Grotesk. Ledger is now the frozen legacy theme — it keeps working exactly as it does today and continues to receive bug fixes, but it does not gain new visual patterns going forward.
  • Broadsheet — the default theme. Geist and Geist Mono typefaces, a real type hierarchy (body text through page-level display headings), chips, soft cards, hero placeholders, and dot-metadata lines. New Overdeck UI patterns land here first, and only here.
Both themes are fully self-hosted — the dashboard makes zero external font requests in either theme, so switching (or working offline) never depends on a CDN.

​
Choosing a theme

Go to Settings → Appearance. The Overdeck Theme picker shows both themes as selectable cards, each with a one-line description and a live mini-specimen rendered in that theme’s own fonts, so you can compare them side by side before choosing. Selecting a card applies the theme immediately — no page reload, no rebuild, no restart. Your choice is saved to ~/.overdeck/config.yaml and mirrored to the browser so it survives a reload.

​
Configuration

The setting is ui.theme in ~/.overdeck/config.yaml:
  • Accepted values are ledger and broadsheet.
  • Leaving it unset resolves to broadsheet.
  • Any other value fails loudly with a clear error naming the field and the two allowed values — Overdeck never silently falls back to a default when a config value is invalid.

​
What stays the same either way

This is a typography, texture, and scale change — not a color change. The color palette, the meaning of each status color (amber = a human needs to act, blue = a machine is working, and so on), and the badge tint formula are identical under both themes. The one small visual difference outside typography is that badges use a slightly larger corner radius under Broadsheet for texture consistency with its softer vocabulary; Ledger’s badge radius is unchanged.

​
Creation flows are pages, not modals

Independent of which theme you use, Overdeck is moving major creation and composition flows — new project, new workspace, and future editors — out of modal dialogs and into full routed pages. Modals remain for what they’re good at: confirmations and short forms of four fields or fewer. You’ll see this rolled out incrementally, starting with the New Workspace flow; existing modal-based flows are migrated one at a time rather than all at once.

​
For developers: why this is safe to adopt gradually

New dashboard surfaces are written against the Broadsheet vocabulary directly — no per-component “if the theme is X” logic. The display-scale utilities (page and section headings) and the eyebrow label resolve to a matching, already-shipped Ledger style when Broadsheet isn’t active, so a surface built only from those renders correctly under either theme without extra work: it just looks a little denser and smaller under Ledger. The newer component vocabulary — chips, soft cards, hero placeholders, the large CTA + keycap pattern, and dot-metadata lines — has no Ledger equivalent at all; a surface built with those is a Broadsheet-only surface by design (Ledger is frozen legacy and doesn’t receive new patterns). See design/style-guide/STYLE-GUIDE.md for the full component-level specification, including which utilities fall into each category.