# Brand guidelines — visual identity

> The visual canon for everything this engine produces. Loaded by the image and print agents. Voice lives in `voice-playbook.md`; forbidden vocabulary in `never-list.md`; machine-readable tokens and the image index in `pillar-canon/tokens.md`. The full rendered source (78KB HTML) lives in the read-only old repo at `brand-guidelines/index.html` — see `EXTRACTION-LOG.md`.

## The one thing someone remembers
A near-black or bone-white field, a single warm orange accent that *glows*, crisp Geist typography, and imagery that looks like **infrastructure, not promotion.**

---

## Color — mono-accent system

Orange is the only chromatic hue in the system. Everything else is grayscale: near-black, bone-white, cool steel as atmosphere only. White is the workhorse; orange is the moment (one or two accents per composition, maximum).

| Token | Hex | Use |
|---|---|---|
| `--orange` | `#FD7310` | Brand orange. The one chromatic accent: primary CTAs, the logo mark, deliberate accents. |
| `--orange-glow` | `#FF8C3F` | Halos, gradient highlights, hover bloom. |
| `--orange-deep` | `#C4530A` | Mesh-gradient depth, pressed states. |
| `--orange-haze` | `rgba(253, 115, 16, 0.08)` | Ambient orange wash for atmosphere. |
| **Badge-glow range** | `#FF8A2A` – `#FFB066` | The "Hi" badge glow specifically — the warm bloom on the pillar head. See pillar canon below. |

Never use orange for body copy, generic icons, or filler.

## Type

- **Geist** (sans) — interface, body, and display. All UI text.
- **Geist Mono** — labels, eyebrows, data overlays, station codes, captions with metadata.
- No serif body. No display script.

## Logo

- The orange **"Hi"** wordmark / badge. Geometry fixed. Color invariant.
- No drop shadows, gradients, or outlines on the mark itself (the *pillar render* may show the badge glowing — that is the render's light, not a logo effect).
- Marks available in `pillar-canon/logos/`.

---

## The pillar canon (binding)

Every HiON charger image is a **stylized concept render, not a photo of a real unit.**

- **Form.** A matte-white V4-form pillar — smooth, slim, curved monolithic white pillar with softly rounded vertical edges and a gentle taper toward the top; glossy/satin white finish, closer to a sculpted appliance than to a real Tesla V4. It is **not** a real Tesla V4 unit.
- **Brand surface.** A glowing terracotta-orange **"Hi" speech-bubble badge** on the head: rounded-square orange/amber speech bubble, lower-left tail, white lowercase "Hi." In dark scenes the badge is backlit and acts as the single chromatic light source, casting warm spill onto the matte-white surface (badge-glow range `#FF8A2A`–`#FFB066`, soft bloom).
- **Cable & base.** Thick black charging cable on a side holster, draping naturally; black rectangular plinth base.
- **No other branding.** No Tesla logo, no "T" mark, no manufacturer markings. The Hi speech-bubble is the only logo on the unit.
- **Reference images.** Generate from the canonical references in `pillar-canon/` (image-to-image), never by editing photos of real Tesla units. The master img2img reference is `pillar-canon/images/charger-reference-master.png`.

Real-world HiON sites deploy actual Tesla V4 hardware in the field. The marketing visual uses this concept design instead — it sidesteps Tesla trademark concerns and gives HiON an ownable silhouette.

## Tesla references — verbal allowed, visual forbidden

- **Allowed (verbal/written):** "Tesla Supercharger," "Tesla network," "Powered by Tesla," "V4," "NACS," "Magic Dock," "Canvas Program."
- **Forbidden (visual):** the Tesla logo in any image, signage, deck, or social graphic. No visual co-branding. No close-ups of Tesla logos as a focal element.

## Imagery — retire these

The brand looks like infrastructure, not promotion. Do not produce, and retire from any inherited library:

- handshakes, ribbon-cuttings, balloons
- family-with-children, storefront group shots
- generic franchise / QSR stock imagery

Use instead: the canon pillar and stations, forecourt approaches, cable macros, blue-hour station scenes, the 1905 historical parallel, aerials.

---

## Mechanical style rules (shared with `never-list.md` Part D)

- No exclamation points, anywhere.
- **HiON** always capital H, lowercase i, capital O, capital N — even in all-caps display.
- Sentence case for headlines and section names. Terminal period on headline fragments is intentional ("The unstoppable shift.").
- Em-dash (spaced) replaces the colon in feature lists and definitions.
- Numerals over spelled-out numbers; commas above 999 (`36,495 ports`).
- `kWh` exactly. En-dashes for ranges, no spaces (`20–30 minutes`).
- Approximations use tilde (`~$550K`).

---

## Font divergence — read before changing tokens

Three font systems appear across the source repos. For the Content Engine, **the canon is Geist / Geist Mono** (it matches both this kickoff spec and the `brand-guidelines/` HTML source). The others are noted only so a future session does not "correct" the canon by mistake:

| Source | Fonts | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Kickoff spec + `brand-guidelines/` (old repo) | **Geist / Geist Mono** | **Canonical for this engine.** |
| `site-v3/DESIGN.md` (old repo) | Satoshi / Instrument Serif / JetBrains Mono | The v3 *website's* own system. Not the engine canon. |
| `Branding/Brand guidelines` JSON (old repo) | Public Sans / Urbanist / Cormorant; green secondary `#61A229` | Legacy hionev.com auto-scrape. **Superseded — do not use.** |

The orange primary `#FD7310` is consistent across all three. Only the supporting palette and type differ; use this file's values.
