Brand

The mark

A T-account

The glyph every bookkeeper draws without thinking: a ruled head, a center stem dividing debit from credit, and two entries of equal weight either side. It is the balance itself, drawn.

Abstract to a stranger, immediately legible to an accountant. The same logic as the name. It carries meaning for the people who buy this, and reads as a clean geometric mark to everyone else.

Clear space

Keep free space around the mark equal to the height of its head stroke on every side. Nothing sits inside that boundary: not type, not a rule, not a photograph edge.

Minimum size

16px is the floor on screen, 6mm in print. Below 20px the secondary entries (the lighter pair) stop resolving. Use the solid favicon tile instead, which is drawn for exactly that case.

The lockup

Mark, numerals, label

1494 is set in the display serif at full weight; LABS follows in the sans, uppercase, letterspaced, in muted gray. The label is subordinate: it names the company, and the numerals are the brand.

In prose it is 1494 Labs, with the space, both words capitalized. 1494labs appears only in domains and handles. Said aloud: fourteen ninety-four labs.

Color

Warm paper, slate teal, and one reserved red

A warm ground rather than white. It is kinder over the hundred-minute sessions this software is actually used for, and it screenshots differently from a category that is all blue-on-white.

The one rule that matters

Claret is never decoration. In the product it means a negative number or a failure, and nothing else. A screen where everything is colored has no emphasis left to spend on the number that is actually wrong. Color here is information, and the red is spent only where it carries meaning. It follows that a marketing page has almost no reason to use claret at all.

Claret rather than a pure red because red on a warm ground is the same hue family and blends; claret is darker and further from the paper, so a loss still jumps.

Typography

A book serif and the system sans

Display type is a Palatino-class serif, a book face, which is the correct register for a product named after a book. Everything else is the platform's own sans. No webfonts, so pages carry zero external requests and never flash.

Numbers

Anything columnar uses tabular lining numerals. Every number in this product is compared to the one above it, and proportional digits make a money column impossible to scan. This is not a preference.

Setting

Running text stays near 65 characters. Headings get text-wrap: balance. Uppercase mono labels take roughly 0.15em of letterspacing. They are signage, not prose.

Voice

Say the thing plainly

The audience is fund CFOs, controllers and administrators. They are skeptical for a living, they have been sold to before, and they can tell the difference between a claim and a proof.

Use the reader's own vocabulary

ABOR. IBOR. ILPA. CC&D. High-water mark. Capital account. Waterfall. Equalization. Say these plainly and do not translate them into general English. A fund controller uses these words every working day, and seeing them used correctly is itself the credential. Paraphrasing them into something a lay reader could follow reads as a vendor who has not done the work.

The first version of the landing page said "two books, one truth" where it meant ABOR and IBOR. It was clearer to a stranger and weaker to a buyer, which is the wrong trade for a page nobody but a buyer will read. The name follows the same principle: opaque outside, a handshake inside.

No em-dashes. Anywhere, in any surface. Use a period, a colon, a comma, or a middot separator instead. A sentence that needs an em-dash is usually two sentences that have not been separated yet.

American spelling throughout. Color, not colour. Center, not centre. Recognize, not recognise. This applies to product copy, marketing, docs and code comments alike.

The name

1494

In 1494 Luca Pacioli published the Summa de arithmetica, codifying the double-entry method Venetian merchants had already used for two centuries. Debits and credits, a ledger that balances, books anyone who knows the rules can check.

Opaque to most people, a handshake to an accountant. If someone asks, that is the answer. One sentence, not a history lesson. The mark tells the same story in geometry.

Assets

Files

The mark uses currentColor, so inline SVG takes the color of its context. Set color rather than editing the file.