Design portfolio

Echidna

A system for producing branded documents

An outline of what Echidna does: how a document is authored, how the brand is applied, what the system guarantees about the printed page, and what comes out the other end.

August 2026

Echidna

What Echidna is

Echidna is a document editor. An author writes the content and its structure, and nothing about how it looks. The layout comes from a brand theme, and the output is a paginated A4 document, exported as PDF or HTML. This page is Echidna’s own output.

The split between content and presentation is the whole design. An author writes structure and words. The theme decides type, colour, spacing, page furniture and how every structured element draws. Neither side can reach into the other.

The authoring model

Body contentHeadings, paragraphs, lists, tables, links and images, written as plain structured text
Page blocksFenced metadata blocks that declare a cover, a contents page, document settings or an end page
Content blocksNamed blocks for structured content, each rendered by the theme rather than hand-drawn
Layout commentsExplicit page breaks and keep-together markers for the few places pagination needs a human decision

Page constructs

Construct	What it does
Cover	Title page from declared fields, with its own template per brand
Contents	Generated from the document's headings, with page numbers resolved at export
Page break	Starts a new sheet at a chosen point
Keep together	Prevents a pair of elements splitting across a sheet

Echidna

Construct	What it does
End page	Closing page, and a formal variant for policy documents
Running header and footer	Per-page logo, client logo, page numbers and text, configured per document

The block library

Around thirty named blocks cover the shapes that recur in consulting documents. An author names the block and fills its fields; the theme draws it.

ComparisonTwo-panel before and after, do and don't, or option against option
QuantitiesMetric tiles, pie and bar charts, funnels, market-size nesting
SequenceTimelines, roadmaps, flowcharts, Gantt charts, process diagrams
StructureHierarchies, matrices, mind maps, SWOT panels, Venn diagrams
EmphasisCallouts, leads, features, key-point panels, checklists, quotes
People and workEmployee profiles and case-study layouts

How the brand is applied

Styling resolves in layers. A foundation layer defines the raw values, a brand layer maps them to that brand's palette and type, a document layer sets the page model, and each block adds its own treatment on top. No block is allowed a colour of its own, so a second brand is a new set of values rather than a redraw.

Note

The values come from one source and are checked automatically, so the colour and type in a document, a slide deck and the design system itself cannot drift apart.

Echidna

What the printed page guarantees

Pagination is the hard part of a document tool. The system measures each composed page and splits tables, lists and blocks across sheets to hold a set of invariants.

No overflowing sheetNo page is taller than the A4 content box, so nothing is clipped in the PDF
No stranded headingA page never ends on a heading whose content sits overleaf
Contents stands aloneThe contents page never shares a sheet with the first section
No split tables rejoined badlyOne table never appears as two fragments on the same page

Each of these is checked on finished pages rather than trusted, so a new block that cannot be split across a sheet is caught while it is being made instead of turning up as a clipped page in a client's hands.

Typography

The type scale, line-breaking and rag are set by the theme. Widows are bound at render time: the last two words of every heading, bullet, paragraph and table cell are joined so a line never strands a single word, with a length guard so a bound pair cannot overflow a narrow column.

Echidna

Output

PDFThe primary deliverable, typeset for A4 with running headers and footers
HTMLA self-contained file with fonts and images inlined, printable to the same PDF
WordImport from DOCX for source material, and export where a client process needs it
Inline previewThe same output runs inside a chat surface, so a document can be reviewed where it was drafted

Alongside Platypus

Echidna has a sibling, Platypus, which produces slide decks. They share the block library, the colour and type values and the icon set, and diverge where the medium does.

	Echidna	Platypus
Medium	Paginated A4 document	16:9 slides
Structure	Page blocks and headings	Slide separators and layout directives
Hard problem	Pagination across sheets	Fitting content in a fixed grid
Exports	PDF, HTML, Word	PPTX, PDF, HTML

In practice a piece of work uses both. The document carries the detail and the
record; the deck carries the argument in the room. Because the numbers, diagrams
and language come from the same blocks and the same values, the two stay in step
without anyone reconciling them by hand.