Brand¶

The canonical source for vacancyd's visual identity. Tokens defined here are the only ones permitted anywhere in the project, including the docs site, the tray app, the README and release artwork. If something needs a colour that is not here, that is a brand decision, not a styling one.

Status: console visual direction settled. Its scope is dark surfaces, amber vacancy, slate owner vetoes, Archivo/IBM Plex fonts, hardware sharing controls and workload status cards. Native accessibility and resource-use qualification remain separate. Other applications of this identity remain draft.

The idea¶

The name is doing the work already, so the identity should follow it rather than invent something alongside it.

vacancyd is a vacancy sign. The sign matches the interface: /status reports vacancy: true|false per upstream, and a refusal returns the error code no_vacancy. Use it to show the lending state.

The sign stays lit. VACANCY is always illuminated; only NO switches on when borrowing is withheld. When borrowing is available, the unlit NO lettering remains in place. The sign's shape and position stay stable.

As on the motel sign the product is named after, the lettering is the light source. The plate, its frame and the bar it hangs from are unlit metal. Every asset and every screen follows that: amber marks something lit, so a lit plate behind dark letters, or an amber control that cannot act, reads as the sign wired backwards.

The principle that governs everything else¶

A refusal is not a failure.

A 503 no_vacancy refusal means admission is withheld by policy or a required resource check. It can be a normal result when the owner returns, rather than a service outage. Accepted work still follows its cancel, drain or finish policy; the sign does not promise that computation has stopped or memory has been recovered.

The identity has to carry that, because the obvious visual choice would betray it. Green-for-available and red-for-busy is the reflex, and it is wrong here: it codes the correct behaviour as an alarm and trains people to treat the daemon working properly as something to investigate.

Instead:

Amber and slate carry every normal state. Ember is held in reserve and is deliberately outside the core palette, so that reaching for it is a decision rather than a habit.

The sign goes dark only when there is no answer at all: the owner console shows the switched-off mark until the service returns a readable status. The owner returning never darkens it; that is the sign working.

Colour¶

The core palette has six tokens.

Reserved, outside the six:

Derived tints, one job each. They are computed from the tokens above, not chosen alongside them, and nothing else may use them:

Measured contrast¶

Calculated WCAG 2.1 contrast ratios:

The single rule most likely to be broken: amber-400 is a dark-ground colour. It is the glow of a lit sign, and a lit sign on a white page is just orange text at 1.76:1. Use amber-700 there.

Type¶

Two families, both SIL OFL 1.1 and both bundled locally. Use the bundled fonts rather than a third-party font CDN.

Archivo is a grotesque with roots in signage and high-legibility print, which is the right ancestry for a project named after a sign. Its use in the console is checked with the actual text and window sizes; the font choice is not a comparative legibility claim.

The wordmark is set in Archivo 700, tracked tight (-0.02em), all lowercase: vacancyd. Lowercase because it is a daemon name as typed, and the trailing d should read as the Unix convention rather than as a stylised flourish. Never title-case it, never VacancyD.

The mark¶

A dark sign hanging from a bar, with a lit V.

It is drawn the way the real sign is built: the V is the light source, and the plate, its frame and the bar are unlit metal. The bar is wider than the plate and the sign hangs from its ends, so it reads as a hanging sign rather than a handle.

Four files, in docs/assets/brand/:

The V is lit in every admission state. Admission is carried by the separate NO lettering, as on the sign itself, so the mark names the project and never a state; its title is vacancyd. Explicit status text accompanies the sign, and screen readers receive "Vacancy" or "No vacancy" without the unlit lettering. In Windows high contrast, the unlit NO is hidden while its space is retained.

Every lit cut puts amber-400 on a night-950 plate: 10.88:1, the same pair as lit text in the console. The sign brings its own night, so amber-400's dark-ground rule holds on any page and no light-ground recolour of the V is needed. On a dark ground the slate-600 frame separates the plate at 3.15:1; on white the plate itself stands at 19.18:1 and the rail at 6.08:1. The unlit V is slate-600 on night-950, 3.15:1: visible as a tube, deliberately quiet.

The idle file name predates this design and is kept because the Windows installer ships the brand files as one component keyed on it. In vacancyd's own vocabulary an idle owner means vacancy; the file means a sign switched off.

Rules¶

• Clear space on all sides: the height of the hanging rail.
• Minimum size 16px. Below 24px, drop the rail and use the plate alone. console/web/build-icon.mjs does this for the Windows icon's 16px frame.
• Light only the lettering. Never fill the plate, frame or bar with amber.
• Do not recolour a supplied mark outside its documented palette.
• Do not add a glow, bloom, or neon outline. The V is lit by being amber; a literal neon effect ages badly and destroys the 16px reading.
• Do not rotate, skew, or place the mark on a busy photograph.

The sign in the console¶

The owner console draws the vacancy sign the same way wherever it appears: Archivo 600 lettering, VACANCY in amber-400, NO in amber-400 when borrowing is withheld and --amber-unlit when it is not, inside a slate-600 frame. Status words that are not the sign (CALIBRATING, NOT READY, UNKNOWN) are readouts, set in IBM Plex Mono in their state colour. An amber fill marks the primary action; a disabled control drops to night-900 and slate-400 rather than a dimmed amber.

Voice¶

Keep the documentation direct and technically specific. Explain limitations alongside the behavior they qualify.

State the honest limitation next to the claim. Admission and upstream cancellation are different checks. A closed proxy connection does not prove that the upstream stopped computing. See admission and recovery.

Name what it does not do. The related approaches page distinguishes admission from model lifetime and gateway routing. Describe those differences without claiming the policy is unique.

Avoid: "effortlessly", "seamlessly", "blazingly fast", "just works". The project is for people who will read the measurements.

Current assets and future applications¶

The repository ships the four SVG marks under docs/assets/brand/, the Windows icon under console/icons/, and the console's embedded Archivo and IBM Plex Mono fonts with their licenses. Public documentation is Markdown in this repository. A hosted documentation site, horizontal and stacked lockups, favicon set, and a 1200 × 630 social card are future applications, not shipped product features.

Any new artwork should follow these tokens and sign geometry and be reviewed before use. A missing social card does not authorize a new asset or a claim that a hosted site exists.

Deliberately not copying dnsweaver¶

dnsweaver is the quality bar and the structural model: a fixed token set, ratios documented rather than guessed, fonts self-hosted with licences, a full asset inventory and one canonical brand file.

dnsweaver uses cool navy and cyan, Sora and JetBrains Mono, and a weave. vacancyd uses warm amber on night, Archivo and IBM Plex Mono, and a sign. Keep the same care in the design while giving each project its own identity.

Future refinements¶

The v1 visual direction is approved. These are optional refinements for later identity work rather than release gates:

1. Is amber legible enough as the sole accent? It carries both "lending" and every link and heading. A second structural hue may be needed for navigation so that "lit" keeps its meaning instead of becoming the page's default colour.
2. Wordmark treatment. Plain Archivo 700 may be too plain. Worth testing a version where the V of the wordmark and the V of the mark are the same drawing.
3. Distinctive applications. Amber vacancy signs are a common visual space; registered marks or printed merchandise should receive a separate collision review.