lib-theme-oat

A warm greige, cozy-neutral theme for everyday consumer utilities — personal-cloud dashboards, settings, inboxes, calm product surfaces. Oat, driftwood, mushroom, raw linen. A genuinely neutral grey-warm field (not a pale near-white, not a drenched color), warm charcoal-taupe ink, and a soft muted clay-rose coral accent spent surgically. Warm-humanist type: Fraunces headings over Hanken Grotesk body.

Design philosophy

• Surface treatment: Depth through restraint. The body field is a real greige mid-tone (L≈0.91, C≈0.009, hue ~78) that sits noticeably below cream lightness, so it reads as soft grey-warm "oat" rather than a bright cream/parchment band. Cards step up to a warm near-white (L≈0.975) — the visible card-on-field lightness step is the theme's premium tell and does hierarchy work before the shadow does. No glass, no brutalist offsets.
• Color: Warm neutrals (hue ~55–78) anchor everything. Primary is a muted clay-rose coral (L≈0.55, C≈0.15, H≈35), deep enough that warm-white text clears 4.5:1 — used ≤10% on the primary action, selection and focus. One cool counterpoint: a muted slate-blue info. Status quartet (destructive hotter true-red, sage success, amber warning, slate info) stays clearly distinct from the coral.
• Typography: Fraunces (soft humanist serif, low optical size) for headings — cozy, not editorial-shouty. Hanken Grotesk for body and UI. JetBrains Mono for code. Product register: fixed rem sizes, full hero → caption ramp, body 1.0625rem at 1.65 line-height.
• Motion: Calm-buoyant. 160 / 300 / 450ms durations; emphasized moments settle on a gently damped real spring (spring-gentle), the other springs available for playful affordances.
• Elevation: Soft warm-grey diffuse shadows derived from the warm ink at low alpha — tactile, gentle, never a hard drop.
• Radius: 1rem — soft-friendly.
• Borders: Hairline (1px, alpha 0.14 of ink) so they frame without weight.

Usage

In a consuming app's app.css:

@import "../../lib-theme-oat/theme.css";

Dark mode

Supported — "oats at night". A warm dark taupe-charcoal (L≈0.20, low chroma, hue ~70), deep but not pure black and never blue-gray. Cards step lighter (firelight-on-material logic), the coral brightens to L≈0.68 with dark-ink-on-bright foregrounds per the contrast contract, and shadows deepen.

Font dependency

Load the fonts from the consuming app's entry CSS (top of the file, where @import is allowed):

https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Fraunces:opsz,wght@9..40,400;9..40,500;9..40,600&family=Hanken+Grotesk:wght@400;500;600;700&family=JetBrains+Mono:wght@400;500&display=swap

Or via Fontsource:

npm install @fontsource-variable/fraunces @fontsource-variable/hanken-grotesk @fontsource-variable/jetbrains-mono

Fraunces is loaded with a low opsz (optical-size) axis so headings stay soft and humanist rather than high-contrast editorial.