01
Logo Usage — Do's and Don'ts
The Inkgility wordmark is the primary expression of our brand. It should always be legible, well-spaced, and on backgrounds that provide sufficient contrast.
Do
- Use the full wordmark whenever space allows.
- Maintain a clear space equal to the cap-height of the "I" on all sides.
- Use the dark wordmark on light backgrounds and the light wordmark on dark backgrounds.
- Resize proportionally only.
Don't
- Don't stretch, squash, rotate, skew, or otherwise distort the wordmark.
- Don't change the colors of the wordmark outside the brand palette.
- Don't add drop shadows, outlines, glows, or other effects.
- Don't place the wordmark on busy photographic backgrounds without a scrim.
- Don't recreate the wordmark — always use the supplied vector files.
✓ Correct
Wordmark at full size, dark on cream, with breathing room.
✗ Incorrect
Wordmark stretched horizontally to fill a banner. Never do this.
✓ Correct
Light wordmark on dark photographic background with subtle gradient scrim.
✗ Incorrect
Wordmark in unbranded colors (red/green/blue) — confuses recognition.
02
Brand Colors
Use Purple as the primary accent. Gold is reserved for premium moments, awards, and editorial flourishes. Blue, Ink, and Cream form the canvas. Status colors should appear only in functional UI contexts (success, warning, error) and never as primary brand colors.
03
Typography
- Primary display — Instrument Serif (Google Fonts): used for headlines, hero text, and editorial flourishes. Italic accents are encouraged on key words.
- Secondary caps — Space Mono Bold (Google Fonts): used for eyebrow text, section labels, and metadata in ALL CAPS with 3–5px letter-spacing.
- Body — DM Sans (Google Fonts): used for paragraphs, UI labels, and forms. 400 and 500 weights for most text; 600 for emphasis.
Type scale (web baseline): hero 56–88px Instrument Serif · h2 28–40px Instrument Serif · h3 18–22px Instrument Serif · body 15–17px DM Sans 1.7 line-height · caption 11–13px Space Mono uppercase.
04
Photography Style
- Subject: real small-business owners in their own spaces (no staged corporate stock).
- Lighting: directional natural light. Shadows are welcome — they add depth and honesty.
- Color: warm tone curve. Slight gold bias in highlights; never over-saturate.
- Composition: generous negative space. Faces and hands prioritized over products.
- Avoid: generic "team in suits pointing at laptop" stock, white-paper studio shots, and over-retouched skin.
05
Voice & Tone
Inkgility sounds like a senior designer who happens to be your friend: confident, direct, occasionally lyrical, never corporate. We write the way good interface text reads — short sentences, real verbs, no hype.
- Voice is constant: warm, knowledgeable, accountable, allergic to jargon.
- Tone adapts: celebratory for product launches, plain-spoken for support, formal-but-readable for legal pages like this one.
- Capitalization: sentence case for buttons and short labels; title case for navigation and headlines.
- Numbers: use numerals for any value above ten; spell out one through ten in body copy.
- Inclusive language: avoid gendered defaults; use "they/their" when person is unspecified.
- Avoid: "leverage," "synergy," "best-in-class," "revolutionize," "game-changing," "easy" (the customer decides what's easy).
06
Co-Branding Rules
Partners
Authorized partners (resellers, agencies, white-label) may use the "Powered by Inkgility" lockup in their materials. Minimum size 24px height. Place the lockup with at least 1× cap-height clear space from any other element. Never combine the lockup with another logo in a way that implies a merger or joint venture.
Press & Media
Press and journalists may use unmodified Inkgility logos in editorial coverage. Logo files and a one-paragraph boilerplate are available at press.html.
Customers
Customers may identify Inkgility as their vendor (e.g., "Branding by Inkgility"). For prominent credit placements (case studies, awards submissions), please email brand@inkgility.com for the appropriate co-branded lockup.
07
Application Examples
Good
- A partner storefront where "Powered by Inkgility" sits in the footer at consistent size, with proper clear space.
- A magazine article with the dark wordmark inline at proper proportion next to a customer quote.
- A press release using the boilerplate paragraph verbatim and the standard logo file.
- A customer's portfolio site crediting "Branding by Inkgility" in caption text.
Bad
- Recreating the wordmark in PowerPoint using a similar font.
- Adding "Official Partner" badges that we never issued.
- Placing the wordmark beside a competitor's wordmark in a comparison chart we did not author.
- Modifying the wordmark for a "holiday version" without prior brand approval.
08
Asset Downloads
Asset links above are illustrative for this prototype build. Production downloads will be served from a CDN and version-controlled.
09
Contact & Approvals
- Brand questions / approvals: brand@inkgility.com
- Press requests: press@inkgility.com
- Legal / trademark: legal@inkgility.com
For any use case not covered above, please request approval. We respond within 2 business days.