verbatium · brand.vbt

verbatium · brand guidelines · v1

Every word, verbatim.
On the record. Off the cloud.

Verbatium is the self-hosted meeting notetaker: a bot joins the call, and the recording, the transcript, and the summary never leave your hardware. The brand has one job: make "nothing leaves" feel calm, engineered, and true. This page is how it looks, sounds, and moves.

A notetaker should not be a wiretap you invited.

Hosted notetakers stream every word of your meetings to a third party, so legal, healthcare, regulated finance, and government have simply gone without. Verbatium is the answer that lets them keep the notetaker and keep the data: bot capture, local transcription (whisper.cpp), and a pluggable LLM summary, all on a Linux box you own. In the default configuration, nothing leaves your server: zero bytes, verifiable by egress inspection.

Sealed

Nothing leaves. The brand should feel like a closed room in the best sense: calm, private, in your control. Privacy claims always come with their mechanism, never a vague reassurance.

Alive

The record is happening in real time. Timecodes tick, waveforms breathe, transcripts type themselves. Verbatium material feels like a live session, not a brochure.

Trustworthy

Honesty is performed, not claimed. Early-stage status, join-rate caveats, and the text-only cloud opt-in are styled as confidently as the promises.

narrative source of truth: website/STORY.md · claims source of truth: website/landing-page.md

Speech, becoming a record.

The mark is five waveform bars whose silhouette carves a V: a voice arriving at its quietest, safest point, on your own machine. It fades left to right, loud room to filed record. One color, no outlines, legible at 16 pixels.

paper mark · on ink and photos

ink mark · on light surfaces

on the identity gradient · tiles and avatars

Wordmark

Lowercase verbatium in Space Grotesk 600, letterspacing -0.02em, set beside the mark at cap height. Lowercase because the product sits quietly in the participants list.

Clearspace and size

Keep one bar-width of clearspace around the mark on every side. Never below 16px. Do not recolor per-bar, outline, rotate, or add a padlock to it. The opacity fade is part of the mark; do not flatten it.

Signal blue is the voice. The gradient is the atmosphere.

The base is off-air ink; the light interludes are paper. Signal blue carries every action and accent. The indigo-to-sky gradient is an atmosphere (floor light, waveforms, cursor glow), never a flat fill behind body text. REC red means recording and nothing else. Green means done, verified, local.

Brand 600#2563EB · primary actions
Brand 500#3B82F6 · focus, hover
Brand 700#1D4ED8 · pressed, deep
Ink#070D1A · the floor, text on paper
Paper#F6F9FD · transcript pages
REC red#E5484D · recording only, never a CTA
OK green#2FBF71 · done / verified / local
Speaker hues#2FB9A8 · #E0A63D · #8B7CF6

identity gradient · #1E3A8A → #2563EB → #38BDF8 · always with grain when large

DoPair every privacy claim with its mechanism. Use blue for action, red for REC, green for done. Put grain over large gradients.
Don'tUse REC red for buttons or errors-as-decoration. Paint sections light except as paper exhibits. Use padlock or shield clichés.

Every typeface is a speaker.

Four voices, and the mapping is meaningful. Do not swap roles.

the brandSpace Grotesk 500/600/700 On the record. Off the cloud.
the recordIBM Plex Mono 400/500/600 00:00:11VERBATIUMRecording. Transcribing locally. Nothing leaves this machine. 00:00:16PRIYAGood. Then we can actually talk.
the human asideNewsreader italic 400 What if the notetaker never left the room?
the bodyInter 400/500/600 Plain reading for paragraphs, tables, and UI copy. Comfortable size, quiet weight, generous leading. Inter never shouts; the display face does that.

Mono is a first-class display face in this brand: timecodes, audit events, exhibit labels, state names, and terminals are all IBM Plex Mono. If a decoration does not look like evidence, it does not belong.

Where a normal brand decorates, Verbatium documents.

Timestamps, speaker labels, audit events, exhibit numbers. Every decorative element is evidence from the record.

Confident and plain. The mechanism carries the weight.

Lead with where the data lives, then the mechanism, then the deploy story. No hype words in body copy. No contractions in narrative copy. Witty is welcome in micro-copy (audit events, terminal output, the sign-off "end of transcript"), never at the expense of clarity.

Do"Zero bytes, verifiable by egress inspection, because in the default install there is nowhere for it to go."
Don't"Military-grade privacy you can trust!" Vague reassurance, hype adjective, no mechanism.
Do"Cloud models are opt-in, clearly labelled, and only ever see transcript text, never your audio or video."
Don'tBlur the opt-in line, gate the honesty section, or present planned features as shipped. Early-stage candor is part of the brand.

the promise, quoted, never paraphrased: "Every word, verbatim. On the record. Off the cloud."

Motion is the record happening.

Every animation should reveal the pipeline, react to the user, or tell the story. Transcripts type, timecodes tick, lifecycles advance, terminals answer. Springs and soft ease-outs (cubic-bezier 0.22, 1, 0.36, 1), never robotic linear tweens.

Signatures

The blinking REC dot with a live timecode. The state machine advancing on scroll. The self-typing transcript. The zero settling. The doctor ticks. Protect these.

Restraint

Respect prefers-reduced-motion everywhere: demos render finished, tickers freeze, nothing essential depends on motion or hover. GPU-cheap only: transforms and opacity, no per-frame layout.

Where everything lives.

Masters and exports live in the marketing repo under brand/assets/: SVG masters (svg/), rendered PNGs for every platform slot (png/), and the self-contained HTML sources that generate them (render/). The website's tokens are the canonical values (website/styles/globals.css); this page mirrors them.

Fonts

Self-hosted woff2 only: Space Grotesk, IBM Plex Mono, Newsreader italic, Inter. Never load from a third-party CDN; a privacy brand does not phone home for its own typeface.

Reusing the system

New collateral starts from the tokens and the four voices, follows the honesty rules in website/CLAUDE.md, and quotes the story instead of paraphrasing it. If it could belong to any other startup, redo it.