How this brand was made

Notes on the decisions behind the Y.F. Zhang & Co. identity: one colour that acts, documents instead of illustrations, and a full stop.

The studio needed a brand that could sit on a website, a letterhead and the screens of its own apps without changing character. The reference point was a well-kept independent guide, not an agency site.

Paper, ink and one colour

The page is a cool grey, never warm. Cards are white with a one-pixel hairline and no shadow. Type is slate, never pure black. One vermilion does the acting: the primary button, links, and the full stop at the end of the wordmark.

Every offer is drawn as a document you could hold.

That line became the artefact system. Each card on the site is a kind of document: a passport, a ticket, a receipt, a keycard. Each adds one physical cue, such as a machine-readable line, a perforated stub or a zigzag foot. The cue is the decoration. Nothing else is.

Type

Newsreader is used for titles and Public Sans for everything you read or press. IBM Plex Mono appears only where a machine would print: prices, codes and version numbers.

--page: #ECEDF1;  /* cool grey paper */
--ink:  #1B1F27;  /* never pure black */
--red:  #C83E26;  /* one action per view */

The company is British, so the system follows British conventions. Each page uses one language. Other languages have their own pages, with their own type rules.