Brand Guide

How jean.rw looks, reads, and stays itself

One person, real products, plain words. The brand borrows the look of a terminal and a whois record, then speaks like a person, not a company. Positioning line: software that makes everyday life in Rwanda a little easier. This page is the rendered version of BRAND.md.

logo

96px

48px

24px

A dark tile, a monospace lowercase "j", and a yellow dot at the baseline — part cursor, part the dot in jean.rw. The tile is always #1a1a1e and the dot is always #f5b700, in both themes.

Minimum size 16px; clear space of at least the "j" stem width.
App stores get the full-bleed square variant — platforms round the corners themselves.
No shadows, gradients, or recoloring. Never set the tile on yellow.

jean.rw

The wordmark is always lowercase, JetBrains Mono semibold, with ".rw" in the accent blue.

color

Light palette

--bg #fbfbfa
page background

--card #ffffff
card surfaces

--ink #1a1a1e
text, logo tile

--muted #66666e
secondary text

--accent #0369a1
links, .rw

--accent-strong #075985
link hover

--sun #f5b700
signature accent

--line #e5e5e1
borders

Dark palette

--bg #141417
page background

--card #1c1c21
card surfaces

--ink #e7e7ea
text

--muted #9a9aa3
secondary text

--accent #58b7e8
links

--accent-strong #8ccdf0
link hover

--sun #f5b700
unchanged

--line #2a2a30
borders

#f5b700 is the one color that never changes between themes, and it works because it is scarce: the logo dot, the $ prompt, the heading prefix, and text selection (try selecting this sentence). Never body text, backgrounds, or large fills.

typography

Software that makes everyday life in Rwanda a little easier.

Body text is 17px IBM Plex Sans with a line-height of 1.7. Headings are weight 650 with -0.02em letter-spacing.

IBM Plex Sans · 400 / 500 / 600 / 650 / 700 · prose

$ whois jean.rw — the wordmark, nav, headings, and records.

JetBrains Mono · 400 / 500 / 600 · structure

Rule of thumb: mono is for labels and machine-flavored text; sans is for sentences.

voice

Plain words. "Use", not "utilize". No buzzwords.
Specific over grand: name MTN MoMo, the RRA portal, TINs — not "workflows".
Rwanda is named, not implied.
Modest, self-aware humor: "registrar: Register.rw (I'm involved)". One wink per page.
No exclamation points. Confidence reads calm.
Lowercase structural labels; sentence case in prose.

motifs

$ whois jean.rw

motif: the whois card: facts as a key → value record
prompt: the sun-colored $ marks command lines
headings: lowercase, prefixed with ;; like config comments
cursor: blinks at 1.1s; still under reduced motion
status: active

Use one or two per artifact. All of them at once is a theme park.