Airlock Digital — diagram language reference
An atomic library measured from Airlock's own March 2026 deck and from the site hero — the owner-named North Star for containers, lines and styling. The containers, the icon carriers, the colour fills, the connectors, and the rules for assembling them. Feed any diagram's content into this system and it comes out in Airlock's visual language, ready to fine-tune.
Chrome headings are set in the brand's Plus Jakarta Sans roles — navy ink on light chrome, white on dark; page accents stay neutral, so Airlock's colours appear only inside the specimens and examples.
01 — Real examples
The canonical artwork this library is measured from: the March 2026 deck's own diagram slides, shown from the exported vectors — these slides are the style (owner, 2026-08-21). Unaltered except one archived colour swap (pure #FF0000 → signal red #FF3539), noted where it applies; arrows carry their measured slight gradient. The dark circuit process-flow that used to open this page is not approved — owner verbatim: "not the style… The icon containers as well as the lines are not the style" — and has been removed; the dark ground now speaks the hero language (section 02 and the dark-ground rule below).
02 — The atoms, quantified
Every value below is measured from the deck at 1920 × 1080 slide scale, or — where the panel says so — from the hero export divided by 1.131. The specimens render at those exact values; the numbers live beside the artwork, never on it.
Every permitted fill gradient. All of them run solid colour to solid colour — a fade to transparency or to blue appears on no fill or surface in this system. (Arrow strokes are the one scoped exception — they carry their measured slight gradient; see Connectors.)
| Gradient | Stops | Where it is allowed | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Periwinkle chip | #85A7FF → #4978F3 | Filled icon tiles — the primary node fill | |
| Chip blue | #86A8FF → #4676F2 | Brand-guide icon chip; blue file-chip strokes. A distinct pair from the periwinkle — both live, never normalise one into the other | |
| Lavender stroke | #B5B5EA → #6666CE | Outline-tile stroke only (at 10–20% opacity on white) | |
| Danger | #FBC2BF → #EF534C 64% → #F41309 | Danger card only | |
| Layer pill | #0660BA → #023DB7 | Layer pills and goal pills on zone edges | |
| Navy callout | #252A9F → #282A61 | The navy callout bar | |
| Light band | #F3F9FF → #E8F3FF | Zone bands and footnote strips (variant tail #EEF3F9) | |
| Zone flat | #DAE8FC @ 70% | Stacked layer zones (with #AACAF8 stroke) | |
| Dark ground | #1C207E → #151858 | The navy canvas (dark file chips fill flat #141756 / #151858) | |
| Signal green | #D6DD21 → #89C33F | Allowed verdicts, lime accents, green chip strokes | |
| Signal blue | #37C0FF → #1385FF | Information verdicts, blue chip strokes | |
| Signal orange | #FFA537 → #EC7E00 | Caution verdicts, orange chip strokes | |
| Signal red | #FF6060 → #FF3539 | Blocked / denied verdicts | |
| Chip tint | #FAFAFE → verdict whisper | State-chip body (#DADAFF neutral, #FFDADB under red) | |
| Icon fade | #FFF → #FFF @ 60% | Baked into every white glyph on a filled tile — the one sanctioned alpha ramp |
| Role | Spec | Colour | Ground |
|---|---|---|---|
| Slide title | ExtraBold, sentence case | #151858 | light |
| Node label | Bold 21.9, centred under the tile | #43439D | light |
| Statement copy | Medium, bold emphasis spans | #43439D | light |
| Secondary text | Regular | #151753 (deck drift of the navy — see open questions) | light |
| Footnote strip | SemiBold 23, centred | #3B1C7A | light |
| Layer pill | UPPER 15.1, ls ~1.0, bold lead | #FFFFFF | pill |
| Node label / chip text | Bold, centred | #FFFFFF | navy |
| Chip acronym | Bold, white, direct on the tile — no inner box | #FFFFFF | navy |
| Elbow lines | solid ≈ 2, colour = the chip's verdict | #89C33F / #EC7E00 | navy |
On navy, the hero is the law (owner ruling, 2026-08-21 — FINDINGS-07). Dark-ground diagrams speak exactly three moves: navy chips with signal-gradient strokes — acronym in white directly on the tile, circular verdict badge on a corner; solid signal containers — the stat cards, navy ink on a solid signal fill; and thin solid signal elbows ≈ 2 units whose colour matches the verdict. Never navy-on-navy ink; no dotted runs, no diamond junctions, no outline icon tiles — that circuit language is not approved.
03 — Grounds
Each atom class has a per-ground variant. The pairing is fixed — pick the ground, and the variant follows.
Icon carrier
Light: filled periwinkle tile, white glyph. Navy: the hero file chip — navy fill, verdict-gradient stroke, white acronym direct, corner badge.
Connector
Light: #0000D5 arrows with their measured slight gradient, sequence left to right. Navy: thin solid signal elbows ≈ 2, colour = the verdict — deck arrows never cross to the dark ground, hero elbows never to the light.
Verdict
Light: tinted state chip with a verdict disc. Navy: the hero file chip — navy fill, verdict-gradient stroke, white acronym direct, badge on the corner.
Label ink
Light: #43439D bold. Navy: pure white bold. Navy text on navy is the one banned move.
Zone
No navy-ground zone container exists in the measured artwork — the dark diagrams run open on the canvas. Flagged in open questions.
04 — Assembly rules
Nodes sit on a fixed pitch, never packed. In the six-node chain the 123.5 tiles run on a 288.5 pitch — a 165 gap, 1.34 × the tile. The five-step flow relaxes to a 351 pitch. Keep the gap at or above 1.3 × tile width and identical across the row.
Arrows ride the tile centre-line: they start ~8 after the source edge and land ~30–34 short of the target — the head never touches the tile.
Arrows connect container centres — a horizontal arrow runs on the vertical centre axis of the containers it joins; a vertical arrow runs on their horizontal centre axis (owner rule, 2026-08-24). Never at label height, never hugging an edge. Elbow legs obey the same rule: each leg leaves or enters its container on that container's centre axis.
Applied to every reproduction on this page: the Allowed/Blocked terminal-card arrow (previously at label height), the execution-chain, five-step and detection-row arrows, and one hero connector all now sit on the centre axis.
Connectors run orthogonally only — no diagonals, no curves beyond the bend radius. Elbows bend at r 10.5; a return or bypass drops below the row as a stroke-2 bracket (r 10) and re-enters from underneath.
When a verdict interrupts a flow, the elbow drops into the verdict chip from above — the chain visibly breaks at the chip.
One zone per layer. Zones stack with a ~37 gutter; the layer pill sits centred on the zone's top edge, the goal pill centred on the bottom edge. A verdict chip may straddle the boundary between two zones — that is the strongest move in the language, and it is reserved for the verdict.
Step 1 — build by swapping. Pick the slide or atom pattern that matches the content's shape, then swap the right containers and colours in: the content decides which carrier (tile, chip, danger card, zone, stat card) and which verdict colour each node gets. Nothing is drawn freehand — every element is an atom from this page at its measured values.
Step 2 — a second agent reviews. Before anything ships, a separate reviewer checks spacing, accuracy and alignment: pitch identical across each row, gaps at or above 1.3 × tile, pills centred on zone edges, arrows landing short of their targets, labels on the right ink for the ground.
Normalise, don't copy drift. The deck's own spacing is occasionally inconsistent — generated output must not inherit that. The rhythm rules on this page win over any one slide's measurements.
05 — Open questions