The v2 baseline: tone lives in the text of the concern itself. Nothing else changes.

Notes: Perfect locality — the color sits on exactly the line to read — and the weakest reach: at squint distance all four cards look calm. The device the rest are judged against.

A marker swipe across the concern line — the paper metaphor's own gesture, more area than colored text, same locality.

Notes: The best line-level device: area beats ink weight at a distance while still pointing at the exact line. It reads as "someone already reviewed this file for you." Scales badly if many lines are flagged — three swipes is a coloring book.

The whole paper is outlined in tone. Concern colors the object, not the line.

Notes: Strongest pure-color reach — but the loudest row on this page: three toned perimeters read as more alarm than information, and locality is gone (which line?). The stage-4 worst-first treatment had this same property.

Tone on the left edge only, like the colored spine of a folder in a drawer.

Notes: The border's reach at a third of its volume; the row stays calm and the eye still snags. Pairs naturally with the ledger. Still binary and still can't point at a line.

The sheet itself is tinted — the strongest statement a document can make about itself.

Notes: Unmistakable at any distance, and far too heavy for this fixture world: every calm figure on the card inherits the alarm. If it has a place, it is a reserved top rung — a catastrophic state — not a standing device.

A sticker seal over the card's corner — tone plus a count, breaking the page silhouette the way a foil seal breaks a certificate's.

Notes: The silhouette break wins the four-up scan before color is even read, and it is the first device that carries magnitude — 2 failing vs 5 shadow. Absence-is-calm is clean. Risk: charm shades into kitsch; the dashed seal ring is doing a lot of costume work.

A sticky flag over the page's top edge — the gesture a paralegal leaves on a contract.

Notes: Slimmer than the badge and quieter, but it carries no magnitude and reads as to-do more than alarm — a flag says "look here eventually," not "this is failing."

The corner folds over in tone: this file has something in it. The quietest possible boundary break.

Notes: Near-subliminal — pleasing, and probably too quiet for alert-grade concerns. Better suited to warn-grade ("worth a look") if devices are ever tiered by severity.

The app-icon count chip — the one device borrowed from software instead of paper.

Notes: Instantly understood by anyone with a phone, magnitude built in, smallest footprint of the breakers. But it concedes the document fiction — the chip says "app," and the mini-doc's whole identity argument is "file."

Iteration 2's audit stamp, shrunk and moved off-center so it labels the concern class without covering the content.

Notes: The only device that says what kind of problem ("2 failing" vs "5 shadow") in words. The overlap still costs a little legibility, and two stamped cards side by side start to feel like a prop room. Note the clean card earns a quiet "current" — the stamp is also the only device with a positive state.

A device must work on both v2 compositions. The two provisional leaders on the ledger card: the badge (card-level, silhouette) and the highlighter (line-level, on the toned rows).

Notes: both survive the move. The badge is indifferent to what's under it — its virtue; the highlighter gets better on the ledger, where every concern is already a row it can swipe.