Ivory & Ink.
Most school systems look like the same dashboard template in a different colour: white cards, a navy sidebar, a blue button. This one is built differently. It sits on warm paper instead of white, uses an editorial serif for things that matter, and moves around the school with a dock instead of a sidebar. The colours come from where our schools are: the Nile, red murram roads, jacaranda trees, the morning sun.
Colour
Paper and ink do most of the work. Nile is the brand. Marigold is used sparingly, for focus and for “look here”. Click any swatch to copy its code.
The school's colour
Each school chooses one colour (Chapter 7.2.6). It replaces Nile on the crest, buttons, links and highlights. Everything else stays the same, so every school looks like itself and the system still feels like one product. Try one, and every page follows.
Type
Three families, each with one job. All are free and open-source. Before launch we will host them ourselves so they also load offline.
headlines, big numbers
everything you read and tap
money, dates, IDs
Components
A small set, used the same way on every page, so someone who learns one screen already knows the next.
Rules we keep
From Chapter 9 of the blueprint, turned into design rules every screen follows.
Everyone is marked present; the teacher only taps the exceptions. Salaries come from the contract; the payroll officer checks what changed.
Before a fee change goes through: how many invoices, how much money, and what stays the same. Then you hold to confirm.
The sync pill always says whether your work is on this phone or on the server.
Classes, subjects and fee items are always chosen from a list, never typed in, so reports group correctly.
No framework, no heavy charts. Movement takes under a fifth of a second, and pages change in place instead of flashing white.
Text first, few images. A guardian on a mobile data bundle should be able to open it without worrying about the cost.