We group related elements into colour blocks with rounded corners, and we call them lily pads — pads from which spectacular things bloom, growing from the rhizome of collected community knowledge. The glossary carries the name’s full story, including its debt to the Autistic rhizome.
This page is about what they are for.
A lily pad is not decoration and it is not a callout box. It is the main way this site tries to keep memory in the page instead of demanding it from the reader.
Why they work
In Lynne Kelly’s Memory Craft, memory works best when the environment supports it — when ideas have places to land, rest, and be picked up again. Lily pads are how we do that on a web page.
They work like modern illuminated manuscripts. Medieval scribes used image, colour, and layout to help readers remember and navigate a complex text. Lily pads use colour blocks and visible grouping to anchor ideas in the same way — guiding attention, and letting a reader leave and come back without losing their place.
They create places to land
A lily pad is an intentional pause: a short, self-contained block holding one idea, definition, or takeaway. You can stop without losing your place, and you don’t have to carry the whole page in your head to keep going.
That matters for readers who read in bursts, get interrupted, experience fatigue or overload, or need to step away and return later. Which is most readers, on some days.
They favour recognition over recall
Memory Craft prefers recognition — seeing something familiar — over recall, pulling it from memory unaided. Lily pads help by grouping ideas visually, repeating key concepts in consistent formats, and making important ideas easy to spot again.
When you come back, you don’t have to remember where you were. You recognise it.
They reduce cognitive load
Dense text runs on working memory. Lily pads chunk information into digestible units, separate the core idea from the supporting detail, and let a reader skip, skim, or focus selectively. Environmental scaffolding instead of mental strain.
They make non-linear reading valid
Learning does not have to be linear. Lily pads let a reader move around a page, drop in at different points, and build understanding gradually and out of order. Partial reading is a legitimate way to read, and the page should be built so it works.
They hold memory between visits
Because a lily pad is visually distinct and conceptually bounded, it acts as a memory anchor across sessions. Readers remember that box, that colour, that short definition. Even when the exact words are gone, the structure remains — and structure carries memory.
Using them
- One idea per pad. A definition, a takeaway, a single claim. If a pad needs a subheading inside it, it is two pads.
- Six tints are available — cyan, green, yellow, coral, violet, and rose. They are decorative rather than semantic: no tint means anything in particular, so nothing breaks for a reader who cannot distinguish them and nothing has to be learned before the page makes sense.
- In dark mode they all resolve to a single panel tone. The grouping survives; the variety does not. Design the page so it still reads when every pad is the same colour.
- Never carry meaning in the colour alone. If a distinction matters, say it in words inside the pad.
- A page where everything is a lily pad has no lily pads. The pattern works by contrast with ordinary prose around it.
Where the colours come from
The six tints are pale Solarized-accent washes in light mode, spread around the colour wheel for variety, and a single Solarized panel tone (base02, #073642) in dark. Exact values, slugs, and the light-to-dark mapping are in Color & Palette.
Implementation — how the values are declared and how mode switching works — is in the Reading Experience notes.
In short
Lily pads turn memory from a personal burden into a shared design responsibility. They give ideas somewhere to rest, readers somewhere to pause, and memory something to attach to — which is exactly what Memory Craft asks an environment to do.