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Brand BookLonghand.cards

Black & white,
with one golden eye.

How Longhand looks, sounds and moves. A pen nib with a yellow eye, a monochrome world, and a voice that writes like a letter.

01The markThe golden eye

The Longhand mark is a pen nib drawn in a single line weight, always in pure black & white. Its vent hole — the eye of the pen — is the one place the brand allows colour: a dot of postal yellow. The nib writes; the eye watches the road.

  • — The nib is always monochrome; only the eye is yellow.
  • — Never add a second colour, gradient or shadow.
  • — Clearspace: keep one nib-width free on every side.
  • — Minimum size 16 px; below that, drop the wordmark, keep the nib.
96px
64px
48px
32px
24px
16px
02The lockupNib + wordmark
LONGHANDLonghand
LONGHANDLonghand

The wordmark is set in the editorial serif, uppercase, tracked wide (0.18em), and always sits to the right of the nib. It inherits the ink of its surface — black on paper, ivory on navy — and never takes the yellow.

03One yellow dot#F5DE42

The world is black & white.
The post is yellow.

Longhand lives in monochrome — gallery white, cinema black, charcoal and ivory. Postal yellow appears exactly once per composition: the eye of the nib, a stamp's outline, one button, one underline. If two things are yellow, one of them is wrong.

04PaletteMonochrome + one accent

Gallery White

#F6F4EF

--paper (light)

Cinema Black

#0A0A0A

--ink (light)

Charcoal

#141311

--paper (dark)

Ivory

#F0EDE6

--ink (dark)

The only accent

Postal Yellow

#F5DE42

--post-yellow

05TypographyThree voices

Editorial serif / display

A postcard, and the story behind it.

Grotesk / body

Body copy is quiet and unhurried. Short sentences. Room to breathe. It reads like a letter from someone who is not in a rush.

Mono / labels & codes

Paris / Barcelona / Miami / Washington DC / New York

06VoiceLess feed. More feeling.

Warm, not soft

It cares about you without performing it.

Slow on purpose

Nothing urgent. The opposite of a feed.

First person

A real person writes, signs and sends.

Plain words

Handwritten, story, city, wait, keep. No jargon.

07ApplicationsThe brand at work

Navigation

LONGHANDLonghand

Postage

Par Avion

Buttons

PrimaryThe yellow oneGhost

Favicon & avatar

Wherever the brand appears — a stamp, a button, a browser tab — the recipe is the same: black & white does the work, and a single yellow point marks the living part.

08Motioncubic-bezier(0.16, 1, 0.3, 1)

Everything moves like ink settling on paper: one editorial ease, long durations (0.6–1.1s), elements that rise a few pixels and fade in — once, on first view, never looping. Reduced-motion preferences are always respected.

The editorial ease, drawn once