Round 1: the design flip for the agentic edition, three Portuguese directions

The ask. Dinis, 10 November, about 02:40 UTC (board/guidance/2026-11-10-the-restart.md): "A heavy design flip: modern, very Portuguese, at the quality of the investor decks." The home page leads with "State of agentic": the GAMMA-Ray leaderboard and cards, then our content (the two interviews), then the graph in place of the company list.

The rules for round 1.

• Every direction stays inside brand v2.0: paper, ink, red and green, and the fonts Newsreader, Plex Sans and Plex Mono. The logo is unchanged.
• "Portuguese" comes from form, not new colours: tile geometry, the black-and-white pavement waves of Lisbon's calcada, the ruled broadsheet.
• Placeholders: the companies and scores are invented ("Company A, 82"). No GAMMA-Ray data is in the repository yet. The interviews' names are real; their one-line summaries are mine, for the mock-ups only.
• Made by design/home-designs/flip/make.mjs (HTML, no AI).

A. Azulejo: a tile grid

A band of tile pattern under the masthead. The same tile marks each section and fills the corner of each card.

• Does well: unmistakably Portuguese at a glance, and the tile can carry through to cards, the app and share pictures. The leaderboard boxed in ink reads as an instrument.
• Does badly: the pattern is busy, and on a phone the band and tiles take space. Done carelessly it turns into decoration. Azulejo is usually blue and white; in ink and red it reads as tile but not as the tile. Real azulejo blue needs Dinis.

B. Calcada: pavement waves, a dark top (recommended)

The top of the page is ink, like a night at the summit. "State of agentic" sits in big Newsreader with the italic in red, and the leaderboard has score bars in green. A wave, Lisbon's pavement, turns the page to paper. The section heads are in italic serif.

• Does well: the most modern of the three, and the closest to the investor decks' feel: a dark hero and one strong statement. The leaderboard is the first thing you see on a phone after the headline. The wave is simple enough to reuse as the site's one Portuguese signature, in the footer, the app and the share pictures.
• Does badly: a dark top on a paper site is a big change, and it has to work in dark mode too, where the whole page is dark and the wave must invert. The bars invite comparing scores at a glance, so the "beta, with evidence" line must stay beside them.

C. Jornal: a modern broadsheet

A ruled masthead with the name set big in type, three ruled columns, and the leaderboard as a results table.

• Does well: the most "newspaper": calm, dense, credible, the quickest to build from today's page.
• Does badly: the least Portuguese and the least of a flip. It is close to what we have. Setting the name in type in place of the wordmark is a logo change, which is Dinis's.

On a phone

The recommendation

B, with A's tile as a small detail (the leaderboard's corner, the section marks). B makes the flip the restart asks for without leaving brand v2.0. It needs no new colour and no logo change, so it is the team's to ship.

What follows each answer:

• B (the default, per CLAUDE.md "the owner's recommendation is the default"): round 2 next wake. Dark mode, the GAMMA-Ray card and an explainer block, and the wave in the footer and the app. Then a spec for dev.pages@. The leaderboard waits for GAMMA-Ray's JSON.
• A: the same round 2, plus a "For Dinis" on azulejo blue.
• C: a smaller step, buildable today. The masthead stays the wordmark unless Dinis says yes.
• An A/B test if sherpa@ and synthetic@ split: B against today's home page.

Reviewers: sherpa@ and synthetic@, please read the phones first.