# Onboarding illustrations — the decided direction

```
Status: Current
Owner: _null
Last reviewed: 2026-08-18
Governs: docs/design/dist/** — the onboarding illustration set and what it is for
Review trigger: Any illustration added or replaced here; the onboarding artwork
                in issue #29 landing in the app
```

> **References, not shipping assets.** Nothing in this folder goes in the APK.
> These are the decided direction for onboarding, drawn from
> [`../BRAND_GUIDE.md`](../BRAND_GUIDE.md) §22's master prompt. The vectors that
> eventually ship are drawn *from* these.

Seven illustrations in a matched light/dark pair, named for the composables they
replace in
[`../../../core/designsystem/src/main/kotlin/dev/privacyllc/period/designsystem/art/Illustrations.kt`](../../../core/designsystem/src/main/kotlin/dev/privacyllc/period/designsystem/art/Illustrations.kt):

| File stem | Onboarding step | Composable |
| --- | --- | --- |
| `01_WelcomeIllustration` | 1 Welcome | `WelcomeIllustration` |
| `02_LastPeriodIllustration` | 2 Last period start | *new* |
| `03_PeriodEndIllustration` | 3 Period end | *new* |
| `04_LearningIllustration` | 4 Previous history | `LearningIllustration` |
| `05_PrivacyIllustration` | 5 Privacy promise | `PrivacyIllustration` |
| `06_NotificationPrivacyIllustration` | 6 Reminder privacy | *new* |
| `07_ForecastIllustration` | 7 First forecast | *new* |
| `EmptyStateIllustration` | — not onboarding | `EmptyStateIllustration` |

Each stem exists as `Light/<stem>_light.webp` and `Dark/<stem>_dark.webp`, at
the **same aspect ratio**, so a theme switch swaps the image without moving the
layout. Fifteen are 2048 × 1365; `07_Forecast` dark is 1536 × 1024, which is the
same 3:2 to within 0.02% — 274.00 dp tall against 273.93 at a 411 dp hero.

**They are 3:2 landscape, composed for a full-bleed hero.** That is the second
attempt. The first delivery met the canvas size by upscaling the old portrait
art ~2.8× and padding the sides with a blurred copy of itself: measured edge
detail fell 2.1×–8.8× in the outer quarters on 15 of 16 files, and at real hero
size a hard seam showed around the sharp centre. The canvas was right and the
composition was still portrait.

The set here is natively wide — real painted content to all four edges, verified
by measuring detail across each image and looking for a step change that would
betray a pasted rectangle. None has one.

`EmptyStateIllustration` is the odd one and deliberately unnumbered: it is
Today's "nothing logged yet" state, not an onboarding step, and it is also drawn
in the onboarding previews. Its ring is empty because nothing has been logged —
the same ring the other illustrations fill with cycle-day markers, which is what
makes the empty state read as *waiting* rather than *broken*.

## What these got right, and why it is worth not undoing

Each of these was a correction during review, and every one of them would be easy
to reintroduce by regenerating carelessly:

- **No text of any kind is painted into the pixels.** The app renders all seven
  titles and subtitles itself through `Heading(...)` in `OnboardingScreen.kt`.
  Art carrying its own title prints every heading twice, cannot be translated,
  cannot scale with the user's font size, and is invisible to TalkBack.
- **No step-number badge.** `LearningIllustration` is not only onboarding step 4
  — it is also the Insights empty state, where a "4" means nothing. Baked numbers
  also freeze the running order, and this flow has already changed shape once. A
  step indicator, if wanted, belongs in live UI where TalkBack can read it.
- **`07_Forecast` shows a calendar and a cycle arc, and names no fields.** An
  earlier draft drew a forecast panel listing *Fertile window* and *Ovulation*,
  which the real first-forecast screen deliberately does not show — on a fresh
  install it reports confidence Low and Today reads "Not enough history to
  estimate". A later draft named the correct fields but painted *Confidence —
  Low* permanently, which is wrong for anyone with a settled cycle. Naming
  nothing is the only version that cannot contradict the live forecast.
- **The dark set is a real dark composition**, not the light one dimmed — the
  midnight-plum ground `BRAND_GUIDE.md` §22 specifies.

## These now ship

**#29 is closed.** All eight are in the app, in both themes, as WebP drawables in
[`../../../core/designsystem/src/main/res/`](../../../core/designsystem/src/main/res/)
— `drawable/` for light and `drawable-night/` for dark, so Android resolves the
theme rather than any code of ours. The files here stay as the full-resolution
sources; the shipped copies are downscaled to the height they are actually drawn
at.

They are **not** redrawn as vectors, which is what #29 originally called for.
That was the right plan for artwork that did not exist and the wrong one for
gradient landscapes: there is no honest `VectorDrawable` of one, §42 objects only
to *unnecessary* raster, and the whole set costs 130 KB of the release APK.
`CycleMarkers.kt` keeps its vectors, because a marker's shape carries meaning and
the progress arc is drawn from the user's own cycle.

**The painted-in corners needed clipping.** Each drawing is composed as a card
with its own rounded corner, so the pixels outside that curve are the card's own
backdrop — near-black in the dark set, near-white in the light one. Drawn
unclipped they showed as four notches against the app background: obvious on a
device, invisible in code review. `Illustration` in `Illustrations.kt` clips just
inside the painted curve, and what is left reads as a deliberate rounded card.

## `splash.webp` — the redrawn lockup

Not an onboarding illustration, and it sits here because it arrived with them.
It is the full brand lockup — emblem, wordmark, divider, tagline — and it is the
artwork that closed **#28**: the first lockup set the name as
*Privacy:Period Tracker* with no space after the colon, disagreeing with
`app_full_name` and with every document.

`../../data/img/logo.webp` and `banner.webp` are generated from it:

```bash
magick splash.webp -trim +repage -resize 900x900 lockup.png
magick -size 1024x1024 xc:'#F0E6F0' -fill '#FAF0F5' \
  -draw 'roundrectangle 8,8,1015,1015,88,88' \
  lockup.png -gravity center -composite -quality 86 logo.webp
```

The banner is the same recipe on a 2176×725 canvas with a 660px square card
centred. **It is composed, never cropped** — the lockup is square and a 3:1 crop
takes the wordmark's ends off, which is the trap the first pass at these assets
hit.

No flood-fill this time: `splash.webp` has real transparency, where the earlier
sources rendered their rounded corners against black.

## Format

WebP at the delivered resolution — 4.2 MB for all sixteen, and the same format
[`../../data/img/`](../../data/img/) uses for the marks privacyllc.dev renders.
The delivery `.zip` archives are deliberately not tracked; see
[`.gitignore`](.gitignore).

**These are sources, not shipping assets, and the size is why that matters.** A
2048 px file dropped into a density-less `drawable/` is decoded at the device's
bucket and costs ~11 MB of heap on every device. The shipped copies are
downscaled into `drawable-*dpi` buckets — see the KDoc in `Illustrations.kt`.

## Two things left unmatched, deliberately

- **`07_Forecast` light and dark are different compositions.** Light draws a
  partial ring of hollow beads; dark draws a full arc of dashed circles ending
  in an arrow. Dark states "predicted" more clearly, so it is the one to copy if
  they are ever reconciled — not the other way round.
- **Eight of the sixteen have a busy bottom quarter**, mostly the dark set,
  where foliage and water reach into the band the fade covers. The fade still
  works; it simply covers more drawing than intended.
