Brand guide · v1.1 · August 2026

🥄 The Wooden Spoon Papers

How the league's hub looks, sounds and behaves. For anyone touching the site, the PDF, or anything posted to the group chat under the masthead.

1 · The brand in one breath

The Wooden Spoon Papers is the paper of record for a 14-man draft league. It reads like a broadsheet data desk that has been left alone with the group chat: rigorous numbers, disrespectful conclusions. The spoon — the loser's punishment — is the editorial centre of gravity. Everything else orbits it.

Tagline patterns: "14 managers · one spoon" · "38 weeks. One spoon." Keep the cadence: plain count, full stop, spoon.

2 · Wordmark & mark

2026/27 Draft League · 14 managers · one spoon

The Wooden Spoon Papers

The lockup is typographic: an orange uppercase kicker (letter-spaced 2px) above the title in heavyweight Helvetica. The 🥄 spoon emoji is the standalone mark — favicon, chat avatar, bullet point. No drawn logo exists and none is needed.

On the site the lockup sits in the masthead band: near-black ink (#14130f, both themes), paper-white title, muted sub, and a 4px orange rule along the bottom. The band is the boldest element on the page — nothing below it competes with it.

Do — keep the kicker orange (--s2), the title in ink, on a paper background.

Don't — add gradients, drop shadows, crests, or (worst of all) a clip-art spoon.

3 · Colour

The palette is a colourblind-safe data-visualisation set. Series order is deliberate — blue before orange before green — so adjacent series stay distinguishable for everyone. Never shuffle series order casually.

Series (light / dark)

Series 1 · blue#2a78d6 / #3987e5

Series 2 · orange#eb6834 / #d95926

Series 3 · green#1baf7a / #199e70

Series 4 · gold#eda100 / #c98500

Series 5 · pink#e87ba4 / #d55181

Ground & ink (light / dark)

Surface#fcfcfb / #1a1a19

Surface 2#f3f2ef / #242423

Ink#0b0b0b / #ffffff

Ink 2#52514e / #c3c2b7

Bad / spoon red#b23520 / #e66767

Semantic pairs

Good newsCautionBad news — background/foreground pairs (--goodbg/--goodfg etc.) exist in both themes; use the pair, never a hand-picked tint. Orange (--s2) is the accent for callouts and the kicker; spoon red (--bad) is reserved for finishing 14th and nothing else.

4 · Typography

Role	Spec	Notes
Everything	'Helvetica Neue', Arial, sans-serif	System stack, no webfonts, nothing to load
H1	34px / 700 / 1.1	Title case as written, never all-caps
H2	22px, 3px ink underline	The broadsheet rule — section starts
Kicker	12px / 700 / caps / 2px tracking	Orange, one per page
Body	15px / 1.55
Hints	13px, Ink 2	Methodology, caveats, stage directions
Numbers	`font-variant-numeric: tabular-nums`	Any column of figures, always

5 · Voice & tone

Analytical with banter. The data does the punching; the copy just points at it.

Roast managers by first name ("Jack wins the league", "Start practising your order for the table"). Teams get full names.
Every roast rides on a number. No number, no roast.
The spoon is sacred. The punishment (dressed by the winner, orders for the table, case of beer) is a feature, never a joke to cut.
Honesty about the model. Projections are our Monte Carlo sim of editorial ratings — never present them as official Fantrax numbers.
Fail soft, in voice. When live data is down, say so plainly with a shrug, not an error code dump.
Neutrality is load-bearing. MPalm runs the site and plays in the league. Nothing may quietly favour Me Myself Ndiaye — the other 13 will notice.

Do — "Joelinteon is bottom-4 in 75% of sims. Start practising your order for the table."

Don't — generic banter with no number, sarcasm at players' injuries, or anything you wouldn't post in the chat under your own name.

6 · Components

A− Grade chip — 2.5px ink border, 8px radius. Grades score the draft, not the manager.

Elite spineNo GK for 12 roundsStriker-light Tags — uppercase, 11px, semantic pair colours, max three per team card.

Cards — 1.5px grid border, 14px radius, surface background. Rows — dot = point estimate, band = 10th–90th percentile. Buttons — ghost style, 1.5px border, 8px radius; the active tab inverts to ink-on-surface.

Tables — ink 2px header rule, grid 1px row rules, no zebra striping. Wide tables scroll inside their own container on mobile; the page never scrolls sideways.

KPI tiles (the Overview dashboard) — surface card, 4px coloured top rail, 11px uppercase label, 20px tabular hero value, one-line hint. Rails use series colours as decoration by position (blue, orange, spoon red, gold) — never as data encoding. One row of four tiles, two-up on mobile.

Live status badges — every player name in static content can carry an availability tag (OUT / 75% / SUSPENDED) fed by the FPL feed at load. Editorial copy stays fixed; the badge carries the news. Never rewrite a roast because of an injury — badge it.

7 · Data rules of the house

League play is weekly head-to-head; 11 starters + 2 subs; min 3D/3M/1F/1GK. The loser is bottom after week 35; rounds 36–37 nominate the second victim.
Team names drift mid-season. Map by Fantrax team ID (or manager), never by team name.
Live data comes only through the site's own /api proxy (league ID pinned, endpoints allow-listed, edge-cached). The Fantrax API is unofficial — every live feature fails soft.
Injury/availability data is the official FPL feed, cached 15 minutes, matched to rosters by name + club — flag mismatches rather than guessing.