Design research — wiki institutional redesign brief

Registers the 2026-06-03 institutional redesign audit for the three-wiki portfolio (documentation.pointsav.com, projects.woodfinegroup.com, corporate.woodfinegroup.com), from project-knowledge (a 9-agent Opus browser audit — 5 live sites, 7 institutional comparators, 143 tool uses, 502 seconds wall-clock). Source: DESIGN-wiki-institutional-redesign.draft.md (totebox@project-knowledge, 2026-06-03). Decision 5 (below) is the one design-system token change in scope here — master-cosigned by command@claude-code, 2026-06-03 — everything else in §2 and §6 is template/code work for project-knowledge, included for context.

(This file previously landed as an 8-line frontmatter stub with no body — the real content below was recovered from the original source draft, still present at project-software/project-proforma's drafts-outbound/, 2026-07-03.)

§1 Executive summary

The three-wiki portfolio rates C-minus / 3.6 out of 10 on an institutional credibility scale. The foundations are strong — self-hosted Source Serif 4 + Inter, navy #164679 + gold #C7A961, a DTCG token system, and WCAG 2.2 AAA structure — but they are consistently undercut by prototype-grade finish: dead links in global chrome, empty structural scaffolding rendered to customer-facing surfaces, vendor brand leaking onto customer sites, and layouts that leave 40% of a 27-inch monitor empty on every sparse page.

The single biggest systemic problem is that all three wiki properties were built for the dense-article case and never finished for the common sparse case — empty TOC rails, single-item categories adrift in 3-column shells, blank right columns, and exposed internal taxonomy. This is the textbook startup-vs-institution tell: institutions never expose raw empty scaffolding.

The one decision with the largest positive impact is adopting per-surface, content-aware layout governance: listing/category/home templates collapse to a content-filling grid with designed empty states, while only dense article pages retain the 3-column reading shell. Make that structural decision correctly and roughly two-thirds of the P0/P1 findings dissolve — they are all symptoms of a single layout system applied indiscriminately.

§2 Ranked audit findings

P0 — must fix before any institutional demo: a category-template TOC rail renders a permanent dead "Contents" column on ~35 documentation.pointsav.com category pages; sparse categories sit adrift in a fixed 3-column shell; two design generations (legacy wiki-* CSS vs. the unused modern shell markup) ship in one 4,200-line stylesheet; the projects.woodfinegroup.com global footer 404s on Disclaimer/Contact across 44+ pages; vendor pointsav.com branding and a "PointSav Knowledge" login title leak onto the Woodfine customer site; the corporate.woodfinegroup.com home page links two featured articles to 404ing slugs; and category templates across all three sites render vast blank expanses with no empty-state design.

P1 — must fix before public launch: non-canonical links missing the /wiki/ prefix; a footer category count that doesn't match the real total; unbranded 404 pages; internal ops taxonomy (cluster-totebox-*, fleet-infrastructure-*, etc.) published to a public customer surface; a public editor login exposed in the masthead; dead-empty right rails on non-TOC templates; a consumer-grade "Wiki" home page title burying strong quantified proof points; and corporate.woodfinegroup.com's sidenav disappearing on every template except articles — exactly where new visitors need orientation most.

P2 — polish: TOC disappearing below 1100px with no fallback; an inconsistent body-type step-up; inconsistent category list card treatments; Wikipedia-style "Last edited" metadata instead of institutional citation; unverified ES-toggle siblings; utility pages mixed into substantive topic lists; and a "Recently updated" block where every article shares the same bulk-import date.

§3 Institutional comparator lessons

Twelve concrete patterns from Bloomberg, BlackRock, Stripe, Cloudflare, Palantir, IBM Carbon, and Atlassian: editorial weighting over uniform grids (importance expressed through size, not position); an intent-first home with taxonomy demoted to "browse all"; hiding empty categories from navigation entirely rather than exposing dead nav nodes; designed three-part empty states (positive-action title, one explanatory line, at most one stable-position CTA); "invisible UI" restraint reading as confidence; a single interactive color discipline (one blue for all links/actions/focus, not a palette of accents); a fluid clamp() type scale constrained to a 65–80ch reading measure even on wide viewports; hierarchy carried through weight and size, not size alone; a 3-column shell reserved only for genuinely dense reference content; breadcrumbs plus a visible changelog/freshness signal as non-negotiable trust markers; navigation capped at two nesting levels with a quiet left selection indicator; and accessibility/trust infrastructure (WCAG AA minimum, CVD-safe status colors, visible timestamps and version attribution) treated as a credibility signal, not an afterthought.

§4 Redesign decision — wiki home page

Two-column desktop layout (≥1280px): a 280px fixed left nav rail, content filling the remainder up to a 1200px max width, no right column on the home page (it is a listing surface, never a TOC-bearing one). The auto-generated category list is replaced by three stacked zones: Zone A (editorial-weighted Featured — one large slot at 2/3 width plus two secondary slots), Zone B (a hand-curated "Start here / Most popular" intent list of 5–7 links), and Zone C (a populated-category card grid, minimum 3 articles to qualify — internal ops taxonomy excluded entirely). An empty category reached by direct URL gets a designed empty state (a quiet line-art glyph, a positive-action title, and related-category cross-links) rather than a blank page. Typography: Source Serif 4 body at 18px/1.6 line-height (raised from 17px, the 17→19px responsive step-up removed), paired with Inter for all UI/nav/labels — H1 clamp(34px,4vw,44px)/600, H2 28px/600, H3 20px/600, nav labels 14px/500.

Decision 5 — color (the design-system token change, master-cosigned 2026-06-03): --color-interactive → #0E3A66 (darkened navy; single link/focus/primary-action color, Carbon-style one-blue discipline); --color-brand-surface retained at #164679 for masthead fills and large brand moments; --color-accent → #C7A961 gold, sparing use only (rules, active indicators, key metrics — never a text-background fill).

§5 Redesign decision — wiki article page

Three columns only when an article has ≥3 H2/H3 headings and viewport ≥1100px (left 256px sidenav + a reading column now clamp(62ch, 70vw, 80ch) wide, up from a fixed 68ch that left wide viewports half-empty + a 248px right TOC rail); below that threshold the layout collapses to two columns with the TOC as a collapsible inline disclosure — the rail is never rendered empty. The sidenav renders only populated public categories (zero-article nodes are never emitted, filtered at template render time via an article_count > 0 guard), capped at two nesting levels, with a 3px solid #C7A961 left selection indicator rather than a color fill. Article headers get a real hierarchy: breadcrumb (with JSON-LD BreadcrumbList) → clamp-scaled H1 → an institutional metadata row ("Methodology · Woodfine Management Corp. · Revised <date>", replacing Wikipedia- style "Last edited" chrome) → a horizontal rule before prose. A build-time internal link-checker runs against the rendered sitemap before every deploy and blocks the build outright on any unresolved internal link, any chrome 404, a non-canonical alias missing the /wiki/ prefix, or an ES-toggle target with no live sibling.

§6 Implementation priority order

The first five items are blocking for any institutional demo: a build-time link-checker that blocks deploy on chrome/featured-slot 404s; removing the vendor-brand leak from projects.woodfinegroup.com; authoring real Disclaimer/Contact pages; the category-template redesign (drop empty TOC rails, content-filling grid, designed empty states); and fixing corporate.woodfinegroup.com's two 404ing featured-article slugs. P1 items (migrating documentation.pointsav.com off legacy wiki-* CSS, splitting public docs from internal ops taxonomy, normalizing internal routing, the Decision-5 token change, the home-page zone restructure, and the article-header redesign) and one P2 polish item (collapsible inline TOC below 1100px) round out the full punch list — all owned by project-knowledge except the token change itself, which was project-design's to commit.