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Brand and design guide

The mark, palette, typography, and principles for contributors.

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Brand and design guide

The principles below already govern the prototype. This page is their first written form.

Principles

  1. The physics is the art. Every colour in a scene comes from the star’s light, scattered light or an object’s own temperature. No UI colour appears in the 3D image.
  2. Honesty before drama. A preview shows only what the simulation would do. A receipt carries a number. A Theory or Imagined outcome is marked possible, never known.
  3. Conditions, not outcomes. The player sets physical conditions and pays for them. No power names a result. No word of command from above.
  4. Speak to the player, in the game’s voice. Power, Goals, End turn, Turns. Never to the developer. No stage ids, hashes, renderers or modes on screen or on the page.
  5. Gates are physics; waits are design. What must be true is computed. How long it takes once true is tuned for play, and labelled.
  6. One continuous shot. No cuts between art styles. The cloud becomes the disk becomes the system becomes its worlds.
  7. Provenance on everything. Here, Elsewhere, Theory, and in the Archean and after only, Imagined. The player can always ask where a thing came from.

Palette, from the physics

Spacethe sky, blue-biased near-black--bg

Dustmillimetre dust in radio false colour--dust

Embera protostar through its envelope--ember

Icescattered starlight, the ice line--ice

Lifea biosphere, used sparingly--life

Powerthe player’s one colour: , turns, choices--power

Each accent belongs to a stage. Power is the only colour that means the player, so it never appears in a scene. Danger is Ember, never a new red.

Type

Ice is forming in the disk
Fraunces for titles and the thing a card is about, light weight at large sizes. IBM Plex Sans for everything the player reads. Plex Mono for numbers, times, tags and receipts, with tabular figures.
852,000 years · 4.8 AU · solids ×3 · −2

The mark

Dust to Life in Syne 800, drawn as outlines so it needs no font; “Life” is the warm accent. The dark-ground mark is for the sky, the light-ground mark for paper, and one source draws both and the icon.

The icon, clear space, colours

Clear space is the height of the “D” on every side. Minimum width is 96 px for the wordmark and 32 px for the icon. Do not recolour “Life”, stretch the mark or set it on a busy image.

Text on the sky#e9edf6

Life, on the sky#ffb454

Text on paper#121a2b

Life, on paper#c9641a

The icon’s ground#070a12

Voice

Not thisGuides mode onA toggle whose state shows on its button gets no toast.
ThisGuides on: orbits, the ice line, the habitable zone. Tap Guides to hide them.Once, the first time, as a captioned beat.
Not thisPlanetarySystemsFormation · systemHash 7f3a…Internal names never reach the player.
ThisProtoplanetary Disk · 852,000 yearsProtostar · Protoplanetary Disk · Giant Impacts · Hadean · Archean · Phanerozoic.
Not thisCommand the heavens. Shape your destiny.No command from above, no destiny, no chosen.
ThisThickened the disk at 1 AU: solids 0.6 → 1.8× Earth.The process, and one number, before → after.

Numbers, motion, readability

Numbers

Years as “852,000 years”, “1.4 million years”, “2.1 billion years”. Temperatures in °C. Masses as × Earth and × Jupiter. Distances in AU with one decimal. A percentage only when the player can act on it. One formatting rule, used everywhere.

Motion

Camera moves follow the physics and never ease a physical motion. A card opens with a 400 ms ease, a cut under reduced motion. Nothing swoops.

Readability

While a card is open, the thing it talks about is in the free space beside or above it, framed and marked with the card's own numbers. 44 pt targets. Phone first.