Warmth, engineered. AI held safely by structure. Keep the fire.
BRAND BOARD v1 · REVISION 01 — PROPOSED · 2026-07-1901 · Narrative
Every civilization organized itself around a contained fire. The hearth was never the flame — it was the architecture that made fire safe enough to live with. AI is the new fire. Hearth builds the structure that lets careful people sit down next to it.
A hearth is masonry before it is comfort. Precision produces warmth, not the other way around — so the identity is geometric first, warm second. Never decorative, never cozy-kitsch.
A tended ember is fire at its most efficient: quiet, dense, ready. Hearth’s visual energy is always one small, intense point of warmth inside a calm structure — never glow everywhere.
The arch is humanity’s oldest trust technology: it holds weight by geometry alone. The mark is an arch holding an ember — capability held safely by structure. Human-in-the-loop, drawn as a shape.
The test for every future decision: does this feel like warmth held by precision? If it reads as decoration, hype, or coldness, it is off-brand.
02 · The mark — “The Kept Flame”
Revision 01: the radiance halo is retired as a static logo treatment. The default dark-mode mark ships crisp — ivory structure, ember-400 dot, nothing behind it. Radiance lives on as a motion/video device only (§08, Radiance Rings study).
Post plus arch is a distilled lowercase h — the name lives inside the mark. It reads as “arch + dot” at 16px and as Hearth’s initial at every size above.
96-unit grid, 12-unit stroke (1:5 of mark height), 24-unit arch radius, 9-unit ember. Every derived asset — favicon, avatar, app icon — keeps these ratios; nothing is redrawn by eye.
The ember rests exactly one ember-radius from the hearth floor and each wall. One law defines the whole mark; if the ember drifts, the mark is wrong. Full geometry in svg-construction-prompt.md
03 · Color
Neutrals carry ≥90% of every composition. Ember is dosed at ≤5%: it marks the moment that matters, nothing else. Blue is deliberately demoted to a muted semantic.
Heat — ceremonial/launch surfaces, max one per view
Cooling steel — dark sections, app icon
Radiance — motion/video ember glow only, never a static logo treatment (R01)
04 · Typography
Display: Tiempos Headline (free: Fraunces). Text/UI: ABC Diatype or Graphik (free: Inter). Code: Berkeley Mono (free: JetBrains Mono). This board renders with local fallbacks — Georgia / system sans / Menlo — so it opens anywhere without network requests.
05 · Graphic language
Topographic rings converge to one ember focus. Survey map to industrial buyers; heat map to AI buyers. Now also a motion device — study in §08.
Broken arcs, radii 1:2:3, opacity halving per ring — capability radiating through a workflow. A motion/video device, never a static halo. Study in §08.
Images and featured cards may take the arch shape — the mark echoed, never repeated. Heat gradient is ceremonial-only.
06 · Interface
Navigation — 64px, hairline rule, Ember dot marks the active link
Hover: fills warm one step; tertiary underline ignites left→right (160ms kindle)
Kindles from a point (600ms), then breathes at 2.4s — each breath releases one thin heat contour. 14px core: still compact, no longer missable. Never a spinner. Reduced motion: static ember + “Loading…” text.
Messy PDFs, spreadsheets, and emails turned into an analyst-ready credit note. Human review before anything moves.
● 14 accounts flagged · analyst sign-off pending
Example only — not a real client result
Focus: 2px ember ring, 2px offset — always visible
No workflows yet. Light the first one.
07 · Motion — “Kindle and cool”
Revision 01 — slowed and staged so viewers can register each beat: a tiny ember point appears and holds; it grows smoothly into the full orange circle while a heat-contour field opens outward with it; only then does the geometric h draw around the fire, igniting warm and cooling to ivory; the completed mark settles with one small breath.
0–0.35s spark — the point registers · 0.35–1.4s ember kindles to full; heat field expands with it · 1.7–2.4s the h draws around the fire · 2.4–2.8s settle
Micro durations 90 / 160 / 240 / 420ms · ceremonial reveal 2800ms (was 900ms in v1 — too quick, per Ibrahim) · kindle in cubic-bezier(.32,0,.12,1) · cool out cubic-bezier(.4,.14,.6,1) · no bounce, no spin, no parallax · reversed for outros: the structure cools away, the ember remains — the fire is kept · full spec with reduced-motion fallbacks in motion-spec.md
08 · Motion studies — for video & animated moments
Independent, replayable studies of the two graphic-language systems in motion — for video intros/outros, section transitions, launch and hiring graphics. Both are devices, not default treatments: they play, resolve, and end clean.
0–0.5s ember point kindles · 0.5–2.7s six thin contours open outward, inner to outer at 200ms intervals, each settling to its resting weight · 2.7–3.2s the field holds; the ember glows once and rests.
Use for: video b-roll under narration, section backgrounds forming as a page settles, report/deck covers animating in, the “we map the workflow” beat in demos. Surveyed and technical, never psychedelic — contours never pulse or recolor.
Reduced motion: the completed contour field appears as a static composition.
0–0.5s ember ignites · 0.5–2.2s three broken rings draw outward on a 400ms rhythm — radii 1:2:3, opacity halving per ring (.9 / .55 / .3) · 2.2–3.0s rings hold at rest; the ember settles. Ends clean — no lingering halo, no glow wash.
Use for: video transitions and end cards, hiring/launch graphics resolving in, “capability radiating through a workflow” diagrams in decks. A motion/video device only — never parked behind the static mark.
Reduced motion: the resolved ring composition appears as a static frame.
09 · Social
LinkedIn banner 1584×396 — coal field, contours lower-left, reversed mark right of avatar zone
Your team isn’t behind because they’re lazy. The system around them is outdated.
Cards — front: blind emboss, no ink · back: coal + ivory + one ember dot
10 · Voice
Tagline (recommended): “Keep the fire.” · alternatives: “Warmth, engineered.” / “AI, held properly.” / “The considered way to modernize.” · Product naming: parts of the hearth — Mantle, Kindling, Andiron, Dispatch. Never -AI, -ify, -ly.
11 · Misuse — always wrong