diarie — Brand#

Status: v0.1.1, drawn 2026-07-18 and revised the same day after an external audit. Canonical. brand-book.html is a rendering of this file and the token files; when they disagree, the files win.

This is the visual and verbal identity of diarie, held to the same test as the code: plain files you own, and nothing that owns you back. The brand is a markdown file, two token files, three hand-editable SVG:s, and two agent-facing projections — DESIGN.md for the system (the google-labs design.md format, lintable) and HANDOFF.md for the built pages. There is no portal, no Figma you must be invited to, no webfont CDN phoning home. Uninstall everything and the identity is still here, in the repo, diffable.

The idea#

One anchor: the diarium. Every Swedish myndighet keeps one — the registry where each incoming and outgoing handling is recorded, numbered, findable, never hidden. That is offentlighetsprincipen, 1766, the world's first freedom-of-information law, and it maps onto the invariants one to one. A malformed row is represented, never silently dropped. Git is the audit log. Every task has its id — its diarienummer. The register aesthetic is not decoration on the ethos; it is the ethos, 250 years older than the tool. When the brand must say one thing, it says this.

Two supporting motifs, subordinate to the anchor:

• Herbarium — the -arium sibling, an archive of living things — gives the identity its mark and its warmth. Linné's specimen sheets are 280-year-old plain files: paper, a pressed flower, a label, a stamp — still readable, no vendor, no format rot. His taxonomy is diarie's type system (one genus per specimen, many descriptors), and the dependency graph is the root system, with ready above the soil.
• Genomlysning — examining a sheet by backlighting it, which in Swedish is also the word for scrutiny — gives the mark its halo. Not an aura: the light table. The glow is the honesty.

One sentence, for when only one fits: diarie is a public record of your own work — pressed flat, backlit, and honest.

The mark#

The mark is a pressed Linnaea borealis — the twinflower, named for Linné, his own favorite: a small, modest, Nordic woodland plant. Two nodding bells on one forked stem, which is also the tool's central pair — the CLI reads, your editor writes. Behind it, the light table: a halo in four flat steps.

Files: diarie-mark.svg (square), diarie-favicon.svg (the pixel cut: leaves and bracts dropped, strokes thickened, bells enlarged — use it below 24 px, the full mark above) and diarie-lockup.svg (mark + wordmark). Both are commented and meant to be edited by hand; the lockup's wordmark is Fraunces converted to outlines, so neither file needs a font installed.

Rules, few and firm:

• The halo is stepped, never a gradient. This is risograph light, not lens flare. Four steps: lysning-1 through lysning-4, outer to inner.
• The flower is papper or arkiv. Cream on dark, ink on paper. No third color, no gradients, no outline version.
• Clearspace is one bell-height on all sides (26 units on the mark's 256 grid). Minimum size: 24 px for the mark, 140 px wide for the lockup.
• Don't detach the bells, tilt the mark, add a drop shadow, place it on photography, or animate it beyond the one sanctioned reveal (see Motion).

Named honestly, because the reader is honest: the twinflower is not an unclaimed symbol. It appears in Linné's own coat of arms (1757) and in the Linnean Society of London's heraldry — scientific-heritage bodies, not software, so confusion risk is low but not zero. And Linnea is among Sweden's most common given names: to a Swedish eye the flower reads as culturally familiar rather than proprietary. diarie borrows the specimen; it does not claim the species.

Color#

Names are Swedish, ASCII-folded in code. The glossary, so nothing is a secret handshake: arkiv — archive; yta — surface; lysning, from genomlysning — backlighting, scrutiny; papper — paper; hektograf — the violet copying-ink of old offices, the color of every stamp pad and anilinpenna in every Swedish myndighet of the analog era; lavendel — lavender; fosfor — phosphor, the green of the terminal; bärnsten — amber; stämpel — stamp.

Canonical values live in tokens.css (with tokens.json as the tooling twin). The palette, with its verified WCAG ratios:

APCA values are Lc per APCA-W3 0.0.98G-4g (negative = light-on-dark), given alongside WCAG 2.x because APCA is the stricter, perceptually honest model — and it is stricter here in two places worth naming. hektograf on arkiv scores Lc −22: decorative and border use only, even at display sizes. stämpel-ljus scores Lc −46: fine for short status labels, not for paragraphs. Where the two models disagree, follow APCA.

The highlights have jobs. This is the rule that keeps the palette from being a mood board. The accents are the exit-code contract, in color:

• fosfor is exit 0 and ready — the answer, on stdout. It speaks for the CLI and for nothing else. Never use it decoratively where it could be mistaken for "this is workable".
• bärnsten is exit 1 — you asked wrong (ENOSTORE, EUSAGE, EEXIST) — and stale claims. Correctable, not condemned.
• stämpel is exit 2 — it ran, and the answer is no. The stamp belongs to validate, because validate is the authority that rejects.

On wide-gamut screens the highlights are served again in OKLCH at higher chroma, guarded by color-gamut: p3 — same lightness and hue, so the ratios above hold; the phosphor simply glows harder where the glass allows. The boosted values live as *-p3 sibling tokens in both token files; only the gate itself is CSS-only. The brand book's swatches stay sRGB on purpose: the printed hex must be the color shown.

One hazard, named plainly because pretending otherwise would be off-brand: dark ground with a single acid-green accent is a default AI aesthetic in 2026. What keeps this palette specific is everything the default lacks — the paper, the stamps, the stepped light, the amber and red as full citizens, and the fact that every accent is a semantic claim you can check against the CLI:s actual exit codes.

Type#

Two voices, no third — because the architecture has exactly two sides:

• The archive voice is Fraunces (OFL): what the human wrote. Old-style, soft-serifed, a bit wonky — the hand in the herbarium label.
• The reader voice is Fragment Mono (OFL): what the CLI reports. Plain, legible, unornamented — klarspråk as a typeface.

Fraunces is a variable font; the cuts are tokens:

Neither family declares a Reserved Font Name in its upstream OFL notice (verified against both projects' license files), so subsetting and inlining require attribution only — the copyright lines travel in a comment at the bottom of every page.

Fonts are self-hosted, always. No Google Fonts hotlinking, no font CDN:s — partly the LG München GDPR ruling, mostly the principle: a page that depends on a third party to render its own name has already lost the argument this project exists to make. On diarie.dev the subset woff2:s are served from fonts/ beside the page — the same directory the build tooling (update-stamp.js) reads, one source of truth for every glyph — preloaded, with font-display: swap. Provenance and the verbatim OFL texts travel with the files — fonts/README.md. Regenerate the subsets from the upstream OFL files with:

pyftsubset "Fraunces[SOFT,WONK,opsz,wght].ttf" --flavor=woff2 \
  --unicodes="U+0020-007E,U+00A0-00FF,U+2013-2014,U+2018-2019,U+201C-201D,U+2022,U+2026,U+2192,U+00B7" \
  --layout-features="*" --no-hinting

Voice#

The register is klarspråk. Swedish law requires public language to be vårdat, enkelt och begripligt — cared-for, simple, comprehensible (Språklagen 2009:600, §11) — and a tool named after a myndighet's registry writes like one, at its best. The README already does; this section only writes the rules down.

1. Name the consequence, not the adjective. Not "invalid priority" but "invalid priority urgent — it will be treated as medium". The consequence is the part that tells the reader whether to care.
2. The refusal is part of the product. Say no plainly, give the reason, and where one exists, name the revival trigger. Never apologize for a design decision; never hide one.
3. No superlatives. The strongest available sentence is a plain claim: "That is the whole product." If a sentence would survive on a SaaS landing page, rewrite it.
4. diarie is lowercase. Always, including at the start of a sentence. It is a command, not a company.
5. House punctuation: the em-dash pivot (setup — destination) and the colon as the seam between claim and evidence. Both make the reasoning visible, which is the point of the reasoning.
6. Never anthropomorphize past the one licensed phrase: the reader is honest. The tool has no feelings, only obligations.
7. Swedish is seasoning, not gatekeeping. Loanwords welcome — always glossed on first use.

Words that do not appear: blazing, seamless, powerful, supercharge, game-changing, simply, just (the adverb), and any sentence beginning "Unlock".

Motion#

Motion follows the same discipline as color: scarce, and with a job.

• At most three beats per page; the hero owns one. Everything else is functional transition, not spectacle.
• Never on the install command or any call to action. Motion that leans on a decision is a dark pattern; diarie does not lean.
• One easing: --ease-lysning, cubic-bezier(0.22, 0, 0.18, 1) — slow start, fast middle, very slow stop; the light coming up on the table. Never the browser's default ease.
• Reduced motion is full parity. prefers-reduced-motion gets the complete page, rendered at once — the same information, calm. Degrading honestly applies to animation too.
• Nothing runs longer than two seconds, and below-the-fold beats fire once per session, not on every scroll.

Applications#

The CLI itself. Terminal output uses the semantic tokens: ready rows in fosfor, stale claims in bärnsten, validate findings in stämpel, structure in lavendel. NO_COLOR and non-TTY output are respected without information loss — color is annotation, never the message.

The stamp. Releases carry the diarienummer device: a rectangular date stamp, stamp-red, reading INKOM <date> over dnr <version> — the mark a registrar puts on a handling the day it arrives. It appears on the site footer, in release notes, and nowhere else — a stamp used everywhere certifies nothing. On the pages it is drawn as outlined SVG: rotated text as geometry, so no rasterizer's pixel grid can stair-step it. Its sibling granskad (examined) may appear once, on a specimen sheet.

The small devices. The marker wash — a hektograf tint over a key phrase, at most three per page, because emphasis is scarce; borderless ink with hand-uneven corners, never confusable with the bordered, square-cornered code chip — if the two are confusable, one of them is styled wrong. And the leaf rule: a hairline carrying the mark's opposite leaf-pair, letting the scene recur between sections. The closing line on any diarie surface makes the exit the pitch — leaving is free, and saying so is the brand.

diarie.dev. One static HTML document (≈50 KiB) plus three subset woff2:s (≈152 KiB) served from fonts/, preloaded, cached independently of the page. Zero external requests, no analytics, no cookies, no consent banner because there is nothing to consent to. Revision, kept visible: an earlier version inlined the fonts as base64 (+33 %, a quarter-megabyte single file, paid knowingly as "the page is the artifact"); it was reversed when the release tooling began reading fonts/ — one source of truth beat one file, and repeat visits now cache the type once. The page still survives curl, file:// (with fonts/ beside it), and the archive. If measurement ever shows LCP above 2.5 s on a cold mobile load, that is the named trigger for revisiting. The page's siblings: the fonts/ directory (three subset woff2:s, plus the TTF the release tooling outlines from), og.png (1200 × 630), the link-preview card — path-rendered so it needs no fonts — and apple-touch-icon.png (180 × 180), the home-screen mark. View source is a feature: the page practices what the tool preaches, and it survives curl, file://, and the Internet Archive without modification.

The README. Badges only for claims that are true and checkable (license, CI, version). No stars-counter theater.

The refusals, brand edition#

Like the roadmap's non-goals, these are identity:

• No gradient glow. The halo is stepped or it is not the halo. The sanctioned atmosphere is stepped light at any scale and static print grain (--korn, ≤ 5 % opacity) — risograph, never lens flare.
• No mascot. The twinflower is a specimen, not a character. It does not wave, wink, or wear a hard hat during errors.
• No dark-pattern motion — no pulsing CTA:s, no fake urgency, no confetti at the moment of a decision.
• No tracking, ever, on any diarie surface. A registry that surveils its readers has misunderstood which direction the transparency goes.
• No third typeface, no second easing, no off-token colors. Scarcity is what makes the system legible.
• No brand asset behind a login. The brand is files. Leaving — forking, re-theming, deleting — must always be free.

Lineage#

The same canon as VISION.md, applied one layer up: local-first (Ink & Switch), convivial tools (Illich), calm technology (Weiser & Brown), worse-is-better (Gabriel), and the indieweb's own-your-data ethos — plus Linné's herbarium and the Swedish diarium, which were local-first before the term, and klarspråk, which was tone-of-voice guidance before brand books. The canon is not borrowed for the occasion — the library shows the receipts: its copy of the Ink & Switch manifesto carries a note tracing Adam Wiggins from the Twelve-Factor App (2011) to co-authoring Local-first software (2019), cloud orthodoxy writing its own critique; and the highlight archive keeps the personal-web ethos in others' words — Zeldman on the old web "where people shared honestly on their personal sites," Heilmann's "everybody is invited to consume, contribute and create." Maggie Appleton's Home-Cooked Software carries the Illich thread — that people "should have agency and ownership over their data and software." Amber Case's calm-technology work holds the standard the site aims at: the smallest possible claim on attention. And Jeremy Keith's Declarative design names the test diarie applies to itself: "It all depends on whether the philosophy behind the tool matches your own philosophy."

A visual identity is a small place to apply them. That is the point.