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<!-- SPDX-FileCopyrightText: 2025-2026 Marcus Quinn -->

# Clay Design System: Visual Theme & Atmosphere

Clay's website is a warm, playful celebration of color that treats B2B data enrichment like a craft rather than an enterprise chore. The design language is built on a foundation of warm cream backgrounds (`#faf9f7`) and oat-toned borders (`#dad4c8`, `#eee9df`) that give every surface the tactile quality of handmade paper. Against this artisanal canvas, a vivid swatch palette explodes with personality — Matcha green, Slushie cyan, Lemon gold, Ube purple, Pomegranate pink, Blueberry navy, and Dragonfruit magenta — each named like flavors at a juice bar, not colors in an enterprise UI kit.

The typography is anchored by Roobert, a geometric sans-serif with character, loaded with an extensive set of OpenType stylistic sets (`"ss01"`, `"ss03"`, `"ss10"`, `"ss11"`, `"ss12"`) that give the text a distinctive, slightly quirky personality. At display scale (80px, weight 600), Roobert uses aggressive negative letter-spacing (-3.2px) that compresses headlines into punchy, billboard-like statements. Space Mono serves as the monospace companion for code and technical labels, completing the craft-meets-tech duality.

What makes Clay truly distinctive is its hover micro-animations: buttons on hover rotate slightly (`rotateZ(-8deg)`), translate upward (`translateY(-80%)`), change background to a contrasting swatch color, and cast a hard offset shadow (`rgb(0,0,0) -7px 7px`). This playful hover behavior — where a button literally tilts and jumps on interaction — creates a sense of physical delight that's rare in B2B software. Combined with generously rounded containers (24px–40px radius), dashed borders alongside solid ones, and a multi-layer shadow system that includes inset highlights, Clay feels like a design system that was made by people who genuinely enjoy making things.

**Key Characteristics:**

- Warm cream canvas (`#faf9f7`) with oat-toned borders (`#dad4c8`) — artisanal, not clinical
- Named swatch palette: Matcha, Slushie, Lemon, Ube, Pomegranate, Blueberry, Dragonfruit
- Roobert font with 5 OpenType stylistic sets — quirky geometric character
- Playful hover animations: rotateZ(-8deg) + translateY(-80%) + hard offset shadow
- Space Mono for code and technical labels
- Generous border radius: 24px cards, 40px sections, 1584px pills
- Mixed border styles: solid + dashed in the same interface
- Multi-layer shadow with inset highlight: `0px 1px 1px` + `-1px inset` + `-0.5px`
