nvidia-brand — Cinder — the record

The job queue for a research GPU cluster: sixty-four accelerators across eight nodes, eleven jobs running, nine waiting, and one that will never start.

The second brand specimen, and the opposite end of the corpus from tesla-brand. Where that reference publishes nine colours and four type sizes, this one publishes thirty-one colours and an eighteen-step ramp with front matter naming every token.

Where the style comes from

Transcribed from awesome-design-md/design-md/nvidia/DESIGN.md, read 2026-09-16, and emitted by:

python3 tools/brand_tokens.py nvidia-brand > systems/nvidia-brand/tokens.css
python3 tools/brand_tokens.py nvidia-brand --check
python3 tools/brand_tokens.py --self-test

Three findings, each asserted by --check rather than described.

1. The reference already solved the link problem, and differently in each mode. An inline link is #0046a4 on the white canvas and the brand green on the black one, and its Don't list then forbids that blue anywhere else — "not a button color, not a chrome color" — and forbids substituting any other green for the brand green in a CTA. Solving accent-text would have invented a dark green for the light theme, which is exactly the substitution the brand rules out by name. Both values are pinned per theme and both were measured against the worst ground in their own.

1. The brand red cannot quite carry a sentence on the recessed band. #e52020 reads 4.61:1 on white and 4.30:1 on the soft surface, so the page emits error-text solved at the same hue — #e1181b in light, #f5352f in dark. The fill keeps the published red; only the text value moves. This is the general case the generator's semantics mechanism was added for.

1. Black text on the brand green reads 8.71:1; white on it reads 2.4:1. The reference's own on-primary is #000000, and the solver independently picks it. A specimen that put a white label on that green would be unreadable and would look, at a glance, like every other product.

The direction

• Archetype. Console.
• Data stance. Table-first.
• Density. Compact — 15px rows, 8px vertical padding.
• The one bold decision. The job that can never run is separated from the jobs that are merely waiting. Every scheduler reports both as pending, which is true and useless: one of them starts tonight and the other will still be there on Friday. Job 4471 asks for sixteen accelerators on a single node and the largest node has eight, so no arrangement of the queue places it. The screen says that, says what would make it run, and puts the control to change it beside the sentence.

The second state

The unplaceable job. It is the state a table-first console makes hardest, because a table's whole promise is that the rows are comparable, and this row is not comparable to the eight above it — it is in a different category wearing the same word.

This specimen is allowed red and the Tesla one is not, which is the most useful thing the two of them say side by side. Same family, same problem, opposite palettes: this reference publishes an error colour and a semantic layer, so the band uses it — and still does not rest on it, because the heading names the cause and the row carries the words "Cannot be placed".

Deviations from CONTRACT.md

• §5, the two modes read as a preference. The black and the white are two chapters of one page in the reference, alternating down it — not a user setting. Binding them to prefers-color-scheme is this page's decision, taken because a queue is watched for a whole shift by somebody who gets to choose. The values are the reference's; the binding is not, and the design-notes panel says so on the page.
• §5, motion. The reference publishes no duration and no easing, and its own Known Gaps section says hover states are undocumented "by system policy". The two rungs in tokens.css are the portfolio's, chosen to be unremarkable and to keep every exit inside the 250ms cap. The emitted file states this on its face rather than in a note somebody has to find.
• §2, the typeface. NVIDIA-EMEA is proprietary. Inter is substituted, and this is the one substitution here the reference itself recommends — it names Inter as the closest open-source pairing, "x-height and stroke contrast match within ~2% at body sizes", and Arial as the documented fallback.

Findings kept, with reasons

• slop_scan · default-ai-palette — near-black plus one bright accent. The rule's own text allows it where the brief asked for it, and here the brief is the brand: this is the reference's declared palette, not a default reached for because the axis was free. Changing it would make the specimen a specimen of nothing.
• audit_page · apple-touch-icon-missing, manifest-missing — portfolio-wide, as on every other page here.

What the gates changed

Three findings were fixed rather than kept, and two of them improved the page:

• side-tab ×3. The band's 4px coloured edge and the held row's inset bar both said in colour what the heading and the state word already say in words, so both were removed. The nav's active underline was drawn as an inset box-shadow and is now a real bottom border — same pixels, and now the linter and the reader see the same thing.
• A .card rule that nothing used. The band now rides on it, which is how the corner square — the system's identity tag — reached the page at all.