Brand & design guide. A companion you'd keep for years — not a gadget that does things.
Every decision is judged by one feeling, not feature count.
"Wow — I could use this for years."
Depth, character, craft. Power from flexibility & context.
"Neat — it does lots of stuff."
Breadth for its own sake; chrome; a diluted mental model.
Reference: a Ted Baker shirt (quietly confident); a tailored suit that stays sharp for years. Tenets — (i) character is kept, noise is cut; (ii) every surface, same craft; (iii) power is flexibility & context, not features.
Classic, dark-first: black · oxblood · greys · white. Other colours only when functional.
Status never defaults to the glowing green/red cliché. Prefer absence: a hollow grey ring for OK/unknown , oxblood only when it needs you . Oxblood is scarce — spent only on the cursor, touch, selection/ready, thinking, and genuine attention. Never decoration, never a default-state colour.
Libre Baskerville — the literary voice, Mallory's words & the wordmark.
Libre Franklin — UI chrome: labels, buttons, metadata, captions. Anything functional.
The single most important mark: an oxblood underscore that recurs everywhere as Mallory's presence — waiting, working, speaking. The wordmark is never written without it. It blinks (1.1s) — a terminal cursor giving the brand quiet, living presence even at rest.
Other roles: the bold oxblood _ trailing her words while speaking/streaming; the cursor-bullet before open loop items; the M_ of the app icon. It only appears when it's true — never as idle decoration.
| Motion | Means | Spec |
|---|---|---|
| Touch blip | reaction | border+text bloom oxblood, 30ms in / 160ms out, no fill |
| Building cursor | thinking | _ → + → △ → □ → _, 6s, scale-in per shape |
| Listening pulse | "I'm live" | energetic expanding ring, 1.2s; + idle mic hint |
| Reactive waveform | listening | analyser bars — only when real audio exists |
| Delivery colour | sent / held | copper ↔ grey: slow cool ~3.5s, quick warm ~0.45s |
Sync paired fades from a single --pulse driver via color-mix. Honour prefers-reduced-motion.
Buttons are functional; personality lives in the prose. The accent lives on border + text, never a background fill.
Mic is the one resting-oxblood exception — its job is to invite a tap. Selection is weight-led (oxblood border + bold). Toggle on = oxblood knob + ring. Status circle doubles as pull-to-refresh.
Ink-on-charcoal M_. One master SVG drives Android adaptive (foreground M_ / charcoal background) and the web favicons & PNGs. Cursor foot on the baseline; whole mark inside the maskable safe circle.
Mallory runs a private intelligence service of one — dry, capable, warm-but-clipped. Openers rotate: "What's the brief?" · "Reporting for duty." · "Standing by." · "Where were we?" Narration carries the voice; controls stay plain.
docs/design/mallory-brand-design-guide.md · this page is the human-readable companion.