Brand rules

Status: Accepted

The binding constraints — the ones a consumer must not violate. The brand repo’s .docs/logo-usage.md carries the full usage guidance; this page carries only what is a requirement.

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The mark

A lemon cross-section whose pith reads as a fibre patch panel — eight segments, eight jacketed strands terminated in the rind. Both halves, the playful object and the precise engineering, must survive any reproduction.

Constraint	Requirement
Minimum size	24px screen / 9mm print for the full mark; below that, the four-segment crop (mark-small.svg), min 16px
Clear space	One strand-connector width (8.5% of mark diameter) on all four sides
Colour	Only from the token palette — never recoloured to match a partner brand
Geometry	Never rotated, skewed, stretched; no gradients, bevels, or drop shadows
Outlining	The wordmark ships as outlines; never re-typeset it — edit the SVG or request an export

The closed palette

Four working colours, two surfaces. The palette is closed: nothing outside the tokens appears in brand usage.

Token	Role	Constraint
ink	Structure, text, dark surfaces	—
lemon	Primary brand colour, the fruit	—
fiber (amber)	Signal only — fibre cores, active states, accents	Never a background fill at scale; never body text (see accessibility)
leaf	The leaf	Leaf only — not a general green
paper / pith / canvas	Surfaces	Never more than two backgrounds in one layout

Two hard exclusions:

• No blues, teals, or cyans anywhere. The palette is warm; a cool accent breaks it.
• Amber is not decoration. It marks the fibre and active states. Using it as a fill or a text colour both breaks the brand and fails contrast — the rule is aesthetic and accessible at once.

The wordmark

Always lowercase, always one word, “fiber” always in a second colour except in one-colour reproduction. Set only in Bricolage Grotesque ExtraBold (800), and since it ships outlined, never re-set in a text field.

Capitalisation — prose vs. identifier

The lowercase wordmark is a design treatment. In writing, the name follows one rule:

Context	Form
Public-facing prose — marketing copy, README intros, announcements, descriptions	Lemonfiber (capital L)
The command, binary, package, repository, crate, and any code identifier	lemonfiber (lowercase)
The logo wordmark	lowercase (design)

So: “Lemonfiber sets itself up” in a sentence, but “run lemonfiber up tv” for the command, @lemonfiber/brand for the package, lemonfiber/lemonfiber for the repo. When the name is set in code font, it is the identifier and stays lowercase; in ordinary prose it is capitalised.

The don’ts, as requirements

• No tagline, descriptor, or strapline added to the lockup.
• No recolouring of segments or strands outside the palette.
• No stretching, rotating, or effects on the mark.
• No full mark below its minimum size — switch to the crop.

Governing a visual repo

Brand is judgment-heavy, which sits awkwardly with the canonical-spec rule that every change cite a requirement. A recolour or a new lockup export has no natural DES-R to point at.

The resolution: checkable constraints are DES-R requirements; aesthetic changes cite GOV-R12 (routine maintenance), the same identifier a dependency bump uses. A new logo export that stays within the palette and mark-integrity rules is maintenance against those rules; a change that alters what the rules permit — a palette addition, a new minimum size — is a DES-R change and follows the normal lifecycle.

This keeps brand under governance without pretending aesthetics are requirements.

Requirements

ID	Requirement
DES-R1	Brand usage MUST draw only from the token palette; no colour outside the tokens.
DES-R2	The palette MUST contain no blue, teal, or cyan.
DES-R3	Amber (fiber) MUST NOT be used as a background fill at scale or as body text.
DES-R4	The full mark MUST NOT be rendered below its minimum size; the crop MUST be used instead.
DES-R5	The mark MUST NOT be rotated, skewed, stretched, or given gradients, bevels, or shadows.
DES-R6	The wordmark MUST be set only in Bricolage Grotesque 800 and MUST NOT be re-typeset from its outlined form.
DES-R7	No tagline or descriptor MAY be added to any lockup.
DES-R8	A change altering what the brand rules permit MUST follow the normal change lifecycle as a DES-R change; a change within the rules MAY cite GOV-R12.
DES-R21	In public-facing prose the name MUST be written Lemonfiber (capital L); the command, binary, package, repository, crate, code identifiers, and the logo wordmark MUST be lowercase lemonfiber.

Related

• surface-mapping.md — where these apply, per surface
• accessibility.md — the contrast reason behind the amber rule
• brand repo .docs — full usage guidance