Retromorphism

A UI that behaves like a device, not like paper.

Not skeuomorphism — nothing here pretends to be leather or brushed steel. Not neumorphism — no soft extruded blobs, no shadow-only hierarchy. The premise is narrower and older: a screen is a panel set into a moulded shell. It has frames, notches, status lights and a bezel, and depth comes from structure rather than from blur.

Every value in this repository was read out of two codebases that use it, not picked for a palette.

One language, two dialects

Retromorphism was born on NDEX — a Swiss price index for retro games and Pokémon cards — and later adopted by Memoria, an instrument that shows the shape of a knowledge base. A design language that only ever dressed the product it was made for has proved nothing; this one survived a port to an appliance of a different nature, and it did not survive unchanged.

So the repository is in two layers:

• The core — what both codebases resolve to the same value: the palette, four principles, seventeen rules. Mechanics, not a look.
• The dialects — where the two appliances legitimately differ. Neither is a drift to be corrected: a language that produces only one device is a template.

The origin, live

Captured from nd-x.app on 2026-08-01, phone width, dark system preference — the site serves its light canvas anyway, by choice.

Search hub	A title	Consoles

The shopfront

The landing at nd-x.app speaks the language at marketing scale — captured 2026-08-07. The cartridge logo is set into a moulded bezel with its three diodes; the circuit engraving in the margins is drawn by hand, not generated; and both shells sit in the same frame, one hue apart.

Two worlds, one entry — the hue swap alone	The proof panel — an instrument publishing its coverage

The page closes on a seal — built with assayer, the adopter's engine, public at Yyunozor/assayer-memory-mcp.

The adopter

Its engine ships in public as assayer — the knowledge base whose hub these panels belong to.

The measured core

Thirteen values appear in both codebases at the same value, reached separately over several months — six light, seven dark. The dark ones are the stronger signal: dark palettes are where most systems drift apart. Read on 2026-08-01 from source and computed styles on both sides (contenu/scripts/memoria_theme.py on the adopter's side), not retyped from memory.

Light

Token	Value	NDEX	Memoria
--rm-amber	#E2B84E	retro-accent	--amber
--rm-violet-muted	#7C6B9E	accent-muted	--accent
--rm-ink	#2A2832	text-1	--text
--rm-ink-muted	#5A5370	text-3	--muted
--rm-ink-faint	#7C7890	text-2	--faint
--rm-rule	#A8A0BC	border-2	--line

Dark

Token	Value	NDEX	Memoria
--rm-bg-dark	#1E1D24	app-bg	--bg
--rm-rule-dark	#4F4764	border-1	--line
--rm-rule-2-dark	#3A3845	border-2	--line2
--rm-accent-dark	#9B74F2	retro-accent	--accent
--rm-ink-dark	rgba(255,255,255,.90)	text-1	--text
--rm-gold	#D4A84C	accent-gold	--kraft
--rm-alert	#FF6B6B	diode-red	--warn

Where the dialects part

Measured 2026-08-01, both codebases open side by side. Each side is right for its appliance.

Trait	NDEX (origin)	Memoria (adopter)
Frame	1px solid #000	2px solid var(--outline)
Diode	16px, 8px gap	6, 8 or 9px
Movement	diodes breathe (2000 ms loop)	chrome deliberately static
Hexagon	forbidden	carries the count
Corner radii	6px 6px 14px 14px on the tab bar	families of 16/16/22/22, 18/18/12/12
Default theme	light, served over a dark preference	dark

Strip the colour, keep frames, grooves and radii, and ask whether it still reads as one appliance: the answer is two. A language honest about that is usable; one that hides it is a template that fits neither product.

Four principles

Matter over shadow. Depth is surface levels and frames, never drop shadows. NDEX inverts — dark shells inside a light canvas; Memoria stacks dark on dark. Same principle, honoured by one appliance and set aside by the other, for a reason each can state.

canvas #E3E0EA  ← the page
  s1   #D9D4E0  ← cards, panels
    s2 #36353A  ← dark shells: search, tabs, footer
      s3 #27262A ← grooves, dividers

Two type registers, never three. A grotesque to read; a monospace in small caps, wide tracking, to label. The monospace label is what says instrument rather than website.

Asymmetric radii by position. A module on the left is not a module on the right — 16px 8px 32px 16px on the left, 8px in the centre, mirrored on the right. The shell is moulded, not tiled.

Status before text. Diodes carry state at a glance; the label explains, the diode is read first.

Rules that cost something to learn

Seventeen, each recorded with what was tried first and why it failed. → docs/rules.md

A sample:

• Cap the highlight. A selected state never exceeds 1.4× resting luminance, and nothing flashes — an element that pulses is looked at once, then filtered out permanently.
• Contrast by warmth, not brightness. Lightening an element to detach it turns it into a sticker; detach it with warm rim-light and keep it dark.
• Structural devices must encode something true. Numbered markers only if the content is a sequence; a groove only where two modules actually meet.
• Screens are the one place saturation is allowed. Deep navy ground, phosphor text. Everywhere else, saturation is a mistake.

Anatomy

Slot, module, diodes, moulded shell, identity zone, box variants — each cropped from a running interface with the recipe that produces it, and the five motifs that recur at every scale. → docs/anatomy.md

Dark

Dark is where the language is most itself: the shell recedes, the screens carry the signal, the diodes do the talking.

Memoria	NDEX · Pokémon	NDEX · Games

Files

tokens/core.json     the measured core, W3C design-tokens shape
tokens/themes.json   per-product, per-theme values
tokens/core.css      custom properties, written alongside core.json
docs/anatomy.md      the six pieces, each with its recipe
docs/rules.md        seventeen rules, each with the failure that produced it
docs/principles.md   what this is and is not
docs/agentic.md      what an agent reproduces from sources alone — and what it loses

Take it

The tokens are MIT. Copy them, fork them, ship them in something of your own. What is worth keeping is the vocabulary — named values, the reasons behind them, a date. If you build something in this language, retromorphism is what to call it.

Both codebases are private: the tokens travel, the implementations do not. That is the limit of what this repository can show, and it is stated rather than implied.

— Yyunozor. Named February 2026; extracted 2026-07-29.