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Kanesh

Brand guidelines

Three wedges pressed into clay.

How to use the Kanesh name, symbol, colour and voice. Everything on this page is built from the same files you can download at the end.

Selling by conversation is older than our languages.

Kanesh was an Assyrian merchant colony in central Anatolia. Its merchants sold by letter to people they could not see, and their tablets hold the oldest written record of any Indo-European language, the family of English and Spanish.

The identity takes the one gesture those merchants left us, the wedge a stylus presses into clay, and uses three of them to write the first letter of the name.

  1. Serve
  2. Resolve
  3. Sell

The three wedges map to the promise. Use this line to explain the symbol, never as a product claim.

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  • The three impressions never touch. That gap makes it read as a stamp in clay, not a generic K.
  • Symbol height equals the height of the “k” ascender, and it sits on the baseline.
  • Gap between symbol and wordmark: 0.30 × symbol height.
  • A heavier cut is used in lockups and favicons so the mark matches the weight of the wordmark.

Colour

Warm neutrals and one kiln red. Every text and background pair used on the site is AA-checked.

Rough proportions

  • Bone / paper 70 %
  • Ink / night 15 %
  • Sand 10 %
  • Kiln ≤ 5 %
  • kiln#B83A1E

    Brand accent, primary CTA, symbol

    Contrast: White on kiln 5.7:1 · kiln on bone 5.2:1

  • ink#16120F

    Text, wordmark, dark surfaces

    Contrast: 18.6:1 on white · 17.3:1 on bone

  • night#1E1915

    Dark bands

    Contrast: Bone on night 16.2:1

  • bone#F7F4EF

    Page background

    Contrast: —

  • sand#EFE9DF

    Alternate sections

    Contrast: Ink on sand 15.7:1

  • paper#FFFFFF

    Cards, product UI

    Contrast: —

  • stone#5E554C

    Secondary text

    Contrast: 7.3:1 on white · 6.8:1 on bone

  • line#E6DFD5

    Borders, dividers

    Contrast: Decorative

  • kiln-600#A83219

    Links and accent text on light

    Contrast: 6.7:1 on white

  • kiln-300#F08A64

    Accent on dark

    Contrast: 7.6:1 on ink

  • lapis#2F4BD6

    AI states in product UI

    Contrast: 6.8:1 on white

  • moss#2A7652

    Success states

    Contrast: 5.5:1 on white

  • saffron#E4A23A

    Attention and placeholders. Never text.

    Contrast: —

  • Kiln marks the action or the idea, never whole backgrounds except the app tile.
  • Lapis is reserved for the AI inside product mockups, so visitors learn that blue means the AI.
  • Never put body text in kiln on sand.

Typography

Two open-source families, self-hosted, with no runtime request to Google.

Bricolage Grotesque

Display · weights 600–700, optical size axis

Your customers see one brand. Operate like one.

Figtree

Text and UI · weights 400–700

When the AI shouldn't answer, it hands the conversation to your team with the reason and context. Body text sits at 16–17 px with a line height of 1.6.

Code and data use the system monospace stack.

Scale

  • display-xl44 → 80 px
  • display38 → 64 px
  • h230 → 48 px
  • h320 → 26 px
  • lead17 → 20 px
  • Headings use tracking from −0.02 em to −0.045 em and balanced wrapping.
  • Sentence case everywhere. Never all caps for the wordmark.

Iconography

Lucide, outline, on a 24 px grid.

  • Stroke 1.75, rounded joins.
  • Icons sit in 36–40 px sand or kiln-50 wells.
  • No duotone or mixed icon sets.

Never

  • — Robots, glowing brains or holograms.
  • — Stock photos of people on headsets.
  • — Channel logos as decoration.
  • — Customer data shown without permission.

Supporting motifs

  • The 48 px grid

    A faint grid that recalls a tablet's ruled lines.

  • The diamond marker

    A single wedge head seen from above. It marks eyebrows and lists.

  • Product UI as illustration

    Inbox, chat, order card and charts built in code, with synthetic data and the caption “Illustrative demo · synthetic data”.

Motion

Motion explains; it never decorates.

  • 120–180 ms

    Controls

    Buttons and menus animate with ease-out.

  • 10 px · 600 ms

    Content

    Appears with a small rise, once.

  • > 5 s

    Mockups

    Play only while visible. Anything longer than 5 s has a visible pause button.

  • 0 ms

    Reduced motion

    prefers-reduced-motion removes all movement and shows the final state.

Voice and tone

Precise, calm, commercial, direct and responsible.

  • Precise
  • Calm
  • Commercial
  • Direct
  • Responsible
Master line · EN
Your customers see one brand. Operate like one.
Master line · ES
Tus clientes ven una sola marca. Opera como una.
Voice rules in English and Spanish
RuleEnglishEspañol
Person“you”, “your team”tú (neutral for Spain and Latin America); never vosotros
CaseSentence caseSentence case
Numbers€59.00 · 1,20059,00 € · 1.200
CTAGet your conversation diagnosisPide tu diagnóstico de conversaciones
Say“hands over to your team with context”«pasa a tu equipo con el contexto»
Don't say“AI employees”, “autonomous”, “revolutionary”«empleados de IA», «autónoma», «revolucionario»

Spanish is written natively, not translated. English is native US-leaning. No exclamation marks in marketing copy.