Brand identity v1 — public summary

This is a public summary of Yig Brand Identity — Design Spec v1, locked on 2026-05-07. The full internal spec carries implementation guidance and decisions that are not relevant outside the team. Everything here is durable and external-facing.

Foundation

The brand renders under constraint, not under attention. Three product truths shape it:

1. Headless. The mark reads at terminal sizes, as IM avatars, and inside text rendering. No “splash screen” version.
2. One identity, every market. No regionally-specific motifs. One colour, one mark, one typeface.
3. Instrument, not lifestyle. Closer to Bloomberg / IBM than Notion / Linear. See Computer as instrument.

The mark — ∴

The logical therefore symbol: three equal-radius dots in an equilateral triangle. The figure a reasoning agent draws when it shows its work.

• Premise → premise → ∴ conclusion.
• One primitive (the dot), one relation (equilateral). Bauhaus at its purest.
• Unicode codepoint U+2234 ∴ — ASCII-, IM-, and terminal-native.

The construction is mathematical. The mark rejects optical adjustment. Equilateral means equilateral; pixel snapping is to integers; clearspace is asymmetric on purpose.

Colour

Role	Name	Hex	Usage
Primary	Ink · 墨	#0A0A0A	Mark default fill, body type, structural ink
Background	Paper · 纸	#FAF9F5	Page background. Warm off-white
Accent	Cinnabar · 朱砂	#C8321B	The single accent. CTAs, the i-dot, status emphasis
State only	Phosphor · 磷光	#00B85A	CLI / status indicators. Never on brand surfaces

The accent is rare on purpose. Approximate ink-area distribution on any clean brand surface is 90 / 8 / 1.5 / 0.5. If two cinnabar elements compete on one screen, one of them is wrong.

Typography

• Inter (SIL OFL) for everything content-side, weight 700 for headings and the Yig wordmark.
• The lowercase i-dot in the wordmark is replaced with a cinnabar disc. This is the only modification to the typeface. Everywhere else is system Inter.
• For Win98-themed surfaces, the chrome (titlebars, menubars) renders in Tahoma / MS Sans Serif via local fallback only; the content inside every window is still Inter.

Sub-product inheritance

Three sub-products fill the system. Each renders one dot of the mark in cinnabar, leaving the other two in ink.

Sub-product	Cinnabar dot position	Semantic
Yig (master)	None	Parent
Yig Thinker	Top vertex	The conclusion / reasoning apex
Yig Enterprise	Bottom-left vertex	Left foundation / institutional anchor
Yig Finance	Bottom-right vertex	Right foundation / quantitative anchor

A fourth sub-product cannot inherit by position alone. This is a feature: it forces the product line to stay focused.

Two layers, hard boundary

The Win98 chrome stops at the window border. Inside any window, the brand system rules.

• The brand system (mark, wordmark, colour, type) is clean Swiss + Bauhaus, and renders identically across CLI, IM, PDF, slide deck, and docs.
• The Win98 chrome wraps the public marketing site only. Inside any Win98 window, the content (typography, code blocks, tables) reverts to the brand system.

PDFs, business decks, and enterprise correspondence carry no Win98 chrome.

What you will not see

Five rules govern compliance and protect the brand from misreading as a Microsoft homage gone wrong:

1. No Microsoft Windows flag logo. The Start button is ∴.
2. No “Windows”, “Microsoft”, or “Win98” in UI labels.
3. No Microsoft system bitmaps. All pixel icons are self-drawn.
4. No bundled Microsoft fonts. Local fallback only, or self-host an OFL-licensed pixel font.
5. No Microsoft system sounds.

The marketing site footer carries the disclaimer required by line 1: Visual style inspired by Windows 98 (© Microsoft). Yig is not affiliated with Microsoft.

Where you will see Yig

The mark renders consistently across:

• The CLI banner (ASCII, ANSI 256-colour).
• IM avatars (Slack, Teams, Feishu) — ink circle, white mark, sub-product cinnabar dot.
• The favicon (16 × 16 px direct pixel rendering).
• Slide decks, PDFs, and enterprise correspondence (clean Swiss only — no chrome).
• The marketing site (clean Swiss content inside Win98 chrome).

The wordmark Yig carries the cinnabar i-dot anywhere it appears, including this article: Yig.

The mark is for the decade. Three dots, one accent, no chrome — legible in a controller’s CLI banner, an FP&A lead’s Slack avatar, and a board pack PDF an audit lead opens three years from now, while the surfaces change shape under it. If the figure stops working in ten years, the brand chose wrong. We are betting it did not.