Colophon · Three States of the Design System

Technical fiche

This site is tresestados.design, editorial manifesto of the Three States of the Design System, by Joan Arbó. It is written and maintained in Barcelona. It is published in phases. It is deliberately slow to rewrite.

Editor in chief: Joan Arbó.
Stack: Astro 5, TypeScript, MDX. No heavy client framework.
Hosting: Netlify. Static build, no dynamic server in Phase 1.
Repo: github.com/joanarbo/tresestados.
Corpus licence: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. Text reusable with attribution, non-commercial, share alike. Code under MIT.
Typography: Klim Type Foundry (Söhne Breit, Founders Grotesk, Söhne Mono, Tiempos Text), with system fallback stack while the licences are loaded.
Palette: cream paper #F4ECDC, ink #1A1713, red accent #C8321C, plus an intermediate scale of warm greys. Declared in OKLCH with sRGB fallback.

Editorial method

This site follows a method inspired by three sources:

The Vignelli Unigrid (National Park Service, 1977). The system outlives the piece; any future quarterly revision reads as part of the same family.
The catalogue raisonné tradition (Picasso, Rothko, Bosch, among many). The fiche as an editorial unit. The cataloguing includes the discards, not only the successes.
The Tufte data-ink principle. Every element that does not inform is noise. Red is reserved for the critical. Cream is the protagonist.

Every published piece passes through four filters before appearing:

Documentary rigour: the claim has a source or is marked as hypothesis.
Editorial measure: prose fits a comfortable reading measure (55–68 characters per line).
Accessibility: minimum AA contrast in body, AAA in prolonged body, screen reader compatible, visible focus.
Low effort for the reader: if it requires more than one reading, something is wrong with the writing, not the reader.

Agent deontology

Starting in Phase 3, presumably spring 2027, this site will integrate a Claude agent with access to the corpus via MCP. Before building it, here is published what that agent will never do. These seven rules are constitutional: they only change by public review and explicit announcement.

Never modifies the central thesis of the manifesto. The three states are fixed. The agent may vary tone, density, examples, but not doctrine.
Never invents quotes, sources, URLs, references to advisory, survey data. Uses only the audited corpus.
Never personalises reader identity beyond non-PII signals: time, device, browser preferences, scroll. Does not read your email. Does not profile you.
Never hides that it is the agent who regenerates. Every generated variant carries a visible marker with timestamp and a link to this section.
Respects Do-Not-Track by deactivating all telemetry not strictly necessary for serving the page.
Automatic rollback if the proposed composition fails OPA policies, contract test or accessibility audit. Never publishes anything that breaks contrast, semantics or contract.
Publicly auditable corpus at github.com/joanarbo/tresestados-corpus. Anyone can inspect what the agent reads.

Any failure detected by a reader is considered a serious bug and is corrected publicly in the changelog. The agent is not an authoritative figure: it is a restricted collaborator. The restriction is the guarantee.

Site status

Current phase: Phase 1 · Editorial shell · first demonstrations.
Published: May 2026.
Next phase: Phase 2 (Q4 2026) · first batch of Compendium fiches and the Mendeleev Method.
Changelog: /en/changes · every substantive change of the corpus, with date.
Active agent: No. All text is written by Joan Arbó. The five mutations at /en/states/state-3 are deterministic, no LLM.
Telemetry: Pending. When incorporated it will be Plausible or equivalent, no cookies and no PII, declared here with visible version bump.
Cookies: None of our own. Netlify may set up to two technical session cookies. Detail at /en/privacy.
Subscription: RSS · canonical feed of published pieces.

Triangulation

This site is one of three. All three are connected and fulfil different functions.

joanarbo.com · the person, the trajectory, the talks, the professional contacts. Where I think in first person.
institutoagentico.com · the executive programme, the cohorts, the inscriptions, the prices. Where it is practised.
tresestados.design · the manifesto and the corpus. Where the method lives.

No site sells from another. The footer of tresestados.design links to the Institute as recommended reading, not as a commercial call. The footer of the Institute links to the manifesto as pre-reading of the programme.

Homage to Adrià (and why we do not use his words)

This corpus is inspired by two works of Ferran Adrià and his team: the Bullipedia (the culinary encyclopaedia published in 2016 with Pilar Soler and others) and the SAPIENS method (the knowledge-connection methodology developed at elBullifoundation).

Both names are theirs. That is why this site does not use them. The equivalent catalogue here is called Compendium, and the methodology is called Mendeleev Method (after the Russian chemist who ordered the elements in 1869 and discovered the gaps before the elements themselves). The terms are ours; the spirit is an acknowledged debt.

The foundational logic remains the same: catalogue before innovating. Without ordered corpus, creativity is unconscious repetition. With ordered corpus, creativity can extend into places that did not exist before. Mendeleev demonstrated it with chemical elements in 1869. Adrià and his team demonstrated it with the 1,846 pieces of the Catálogo General between 1987 and 2011. This corpus proposes to demonstrate it with agentic design systems starting in 2026.

Open dialogue

This corpus is built in conversation. When a person in the field (author, practitioner, researcher) accepts being cited or contributes a correction, their contribution will appear here with their name and the date of the conversation. Until then there is no advisory list.

The rule is the same that governs the rest of the site: catalogue what exists, do not announce what is desired. When there is a first documented contribution, this section will be rewritten naming it.

Open channel for anyone who wants to propose a contribution or discuss the corpus: me@joanarbo.com.

Credits

Text: Joan Arbó. All of it. No active agent in Phase 1.
Design and development: Joan Arbó, with conversational assistance from Claude (Anthropic) for technical scaffolding aspects, declared here out of deontological coherence.
Photography (upcoming Phase 2): Dídac Alcoba, with explicit reference to the visual language of Francesc Guillamet.
Editorial revision: pending assignment.

Contact

Two channels. One editorial, one institutional.

me@joanarbo.com · editorial correspondence, corpus contributions, press, interviews, citations, corrections, anything related to this site or to Joan Arbó as editor.
hola@institutoagentico.com · cohorts, executive programmes, inscriptions, anything related to the Institute as an organisation.