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.