Farm HQ
Brand book

Hi-vis for paperwork

Farm software has always looked one of two ways: municipal-green and dull, or Silicon-Valley slick and alien. FarmHQ is neither. Our chartreuse is the colour of a hi-vis vest and a fresh ryegrass ley — impossible to miss, completely at home on a farm. Black is the colour of a good pair of wellies and a cattle board. Together they say: serious kit, zero nonsense.

The brand personality in three words: Capable. Plain-spoken. On your side.

And one law above every rule in this book: simple as a gate latch. Everything FarmHQ makes — a screen, a sentence, a poster, an invoice — must be understood first time by a busy farmer with no manual and no patience. Complexity is the product's enemy and the brand's too: if a design needs explaining, the design is wrong. When any rule in this book collides with simplicity, simplicity wins.

The tag

The FarmHQ mark is "FARM HQ" in a heavy black slab — drawn as outlines, not set in a font — on a chartreuse squircle — deliberately shaped like the thing at the heart of the product: a livestock ear tag. It works at app-icon size and on the side of a Land Rover.

Shown above: the master artwork itself (supplied SVG — chartreuse squircle, black slab lettering drawn as outlines, so the mark depends on no font). Always place this file; never re-set the logo type. A mono one-colour cut (for print and embroidery) is produced from this master — see the asset checklist.

Rules of the tag

• Clear space: keep a margin of at least the height of the "H" on all sides.
• Minimum size: 24px tall on screen, 12mm in print. Below that, use the tag shape alone (no wordmark).
• Backgrounds: the tag sits on black, white, paper or photography — never on another bright colour.
• Never: recolour it, rotate it, add gradients or shadows, stretch it, outline it, or set the wordmark in another font.
• It is artwork, not type. The lettering in farmhq-logo.svg is outlined paths. No font licence, web font or app font is needed for the mark to render — which is why the display face (§04) could change without the logo moving.

One loud colour. Everything else gets out of its way.

Usage ratio

Roughly 60% ground (Milk or Welly Black) · 30% ink and supports · 10% Ryegrass. If a layout feels loud, there's too much chartreuse; if it feels like any other farm brand, there's too little. Ryegrass text is only ever set on Welly Black — never on white (fails contrast) and never as body text.

Why these and not others — the competitive line

The category wears green-and-navy SaaS (AgriWebb, Shearwell, FBN) or fintech navy (Figured, Landmark). Two neighbours in our colour family: Breedr is golden yellow (#FFCB04) — adjacent, not clashing — and Herdwatch's 2024 logo carries a muted olive-lime (#B5C428) subordinate to its blue. Our defence is discipline: keep Ryegrass at full acid brightness, keep grounds Welly Black (never navy), and never introduce a secondary blue — blue is Herdwatch's territory. What makes the identity ownable is the combination: chartreuse + slab type + the tag + the voice.

Accessibility

Ryegrass on Welly Black passes WCAG AAA both ways; Welly Black on Milk passes AAA; Pasture on Milk passes AA for text. Baler Twine is reserved for large text and icons with a supporting label — never colour alone to carry meaning.

Stencil voice, honest body

Display — Alfa Slab One

Alfa Slab One is the brand face: a slab with weight and a worn, stamped, feed-sack character — industrial but human, exactly the register of a farm brand that means business. It is the face every farmer has seen since the first TestFlight build, and v1.4 makes it official. One weight, 400, ALL CAPS, tight leading (0.95–1.05), never below 20px. It ships under the SIL Open Font License: nothing to buy for the app, the web, print or embroidery.

Never let it bold. The face has one weight. Ask a browser for 700 or 900 and it synthesises a bold by smearing the outline — this book did exactly that until v1.4 and looked softer than the app it describes. Set it at 400; the web font is declared as covering every weight so a stray bold can't synthesise one.

Intro Rust (v1.3) was never licensed and never shipped. Removed from the checklist.

Body — a workhorse pairing

Two approved body settings: Helvetica/system sans for the app and web UI (labels, buttons, tables — clarity above all, generous sizes for outdoor reading), and Georgia serif for long-form documents (whitepaper, letters) where warmth and authority matter.

Scale

Say it over the gate

FarmHQ speaks like a capable neighbour: short sentences, farm words, no software words. We say medicine book, not "treatment log module". We say the taxman, not "HMRC obligations". We never patronise, and we never dramatise — deadlines are stated, not shouted.

The slogans

• Primary: "Taking the paperwork out of farming." — everywhere: site hero, app store, print.
• Challenger: "If you don't use this, your neighbour will." — campaigns, shows, social. Cheeky, competitive, true to how farming actually works.
• Product line: "The farm office, in your pocket." — explains the category in seven words.

Writing rules

• No exclamation marks, no emoji in product copy, no "journey", "seamless", "empower", "revolutionise".
• Buttons say what happens: "Send to BCMS", "Order tags", "File VAT return".
• Numbers are exact ("saved £212 this month"), never vague ("save money!").
• British English, always. It's a "mart", a "holding", a "tup" — use the farmer's own words, regionally aware.
• The first-time test: every sentence must be understood on first reading by someone who's been up since five. One idea per sentence. If a sentence needs a comma to survive, try two sentences.
• Never make the reader feel slow. No "simply", no "just" — if it were simple they wouldn't need telling. Make the thing simple instead of calling it simple.

Proud of the sheepdog

FarmHQ is an AI company and says so — no hiding it behind "smart features," no apologising for it. Farmers know AI is coming to their industry; most reckon it's something they need to integrate, not something to fear. Our register: talk about AI the way a farmer talks about a good sheepdog or a reliable quad — a working tool that earns its keep. No magic, no hype, no apology.

Ask Farmer Joe — the named assistant

• The name is always the full phrase in marketing ("Ask Farmer Joe"); "Joe" alone once introduced, in-product. Never "the AI", "the bot", or "your assistant".
• Joe's register: exactly the brand voice — short, plain, farm words, exact numbers. Joe never uses emoji, never exclaims, never says "As an AI…". When Joe doesn't know, Joe says so and says what he'd need.
• Joe answers from the farm's own records and says which. "Based on your medicine book…" — never internet folklore, never another farm's data.
• No face, no avatar, no cartoon. Joe is represented by the tag mark and the name, set in the brand type. Personality lives in the words.

How we write about AI

The data promise — standing copy, word for word

This exact promise appears on the website, in onboarding and in every AI conversation surface. It is now table stakes in the market (Herdwatch states its equivalent flatly) and we match it, bluntly:

Never

• "Revolutionary", "magic", "supercharged", "powered by AI" as a benefit in itself.
• Overpromising autonomy — Joe drafts, the farmer decides. Always.
• AI imagery clichés: no robots, no glowing brains, no circuit-board patterns, no sparkle emoji. The visual signal for AI is the brand itself, loud and modern — the words stay plain.

Real farms, real light, real hands

• Photography: documentary, not stock. Overcast British light, mud, breath in cold air, hands on gates, phones in dirty pockets. People mid-task, never posing at a sunset. If it could be an insurance advert, it's wrong.
• Duotone treatment: for graphic applications, photography may be duotoned Welly Black → Ryegrass. Use for heroes and covers, not for UI.
• Iconography: the bespoke FarmHQ set below — 42 line icons drawn from farm reality, generated onto this page and into the website's sprite from the app's own source file. No abstract tech glyphs, no rounded-cute style.
• Charts & data: Pasture and Flint for series, Ryegrass for the highlighted series only, Baler Twine strictly for warnings. Tabular figures always.
• The tag shape (the logo's squircle) is the brand's container motif: photo masks, stat cards, app icons. Use it instead of generic rounded rectangles wherever a shape needs to feel ours.

The set — v2, drawn on the tag grid

42 marks, every one an object a farmer touches: no abstract tech glyphs, no rounded-cute style. Drawn on a 24px grid, 2px stroke, squared caps and mitred joints — welded, not moulded, the same family as the slab type. The source is app/src/components/icons.tsx; scripts/brand-icons.mjs generates this grid and the website's SVG sprite from it, so the set cannot drift. v1 had nineteen and one of them — the clipboard — was doing a fifth of the work; v2 gives the books a ledger, the bills an envelope, the machines a tractor, fallen stock a closed tag, the TB test a vial, and the people a flat cap.

Rules of the set

• Stroke, never fill. 2px at 24px; scale stroke with size (2.5px at 32px+). Squared caps and mitred joints — the icons are welded, not moulded.
• One object per icon, recognisable at 20px on a cracked screen in sunlight. If it needs a label to be understood, redraw it — same law as everything else: simple as a gate latch.
• Colour: ink on light grounds, Milk on dark; Pasture for supporting/positive contexts; Ryegrass only when the icon is the highlighted action. Never multicoloured.
• New icons join only if they're a real farm object drawn on the same grid. They go into icons.tsx first; node scripts/brand-icons.mjs regenerates this page and the sprite. Never add an icon anywhere else first.
• Plain chrome the set can't cover (a search glass, a close cross) comes from Keyline Icons (MIT), sharp variant only — square corners, no fillets — pasted in as path data through the same renderer. Never a second icon library in the app.

The sticker and the system

The app grew a signature the first edition of this book never described, and the website borrowed it. Written down here with the numbers from app/src/constants/theme.ts, so nobody has to guess.

The sticker

A card or tile with a 1.5px outline and a hard, un-blurred Ryegrass shadow offset 5px right and down — a sticker on a mart board, not a floating pane. Press it and it sinks 3px into its own shadow; there is no other animation anywhere. Buttons use the same construction with a 3px Welly Black shadow.

• Lifted (Ryegrass shadow) means tappable and primary: action tiles, the P&L card, the one card on a screen that leads somewhere. Flat (outline only) is everything informational. One lifted group per screen.
• Outline: ink in light mode. In dark mode a softer edge (colors.edge), so a screen of cards isn't a screen of white boxes.
• Never a blurred shadow, a gradient, a glass effect, or a shadow under text.

The parts

Scale

• Spacing: 6 · 10 · 16 · 24 · 36. Nothing in between.
• Radius: 12px for controls (buttons, inputs, chips), 16px for cards, the tag shape (42% of height) for brand moments, 3px for eyebrow chips. The first edition said 10px for buttons; the app was right at 12.
• Touch: 56dp minimum on anything a thumb lands on. Gloves on.
• Motion: the press-sink and nothing else. No spinner that implies a record might be lost — say "saved on phone, will sync".

Dark mode

Yards are dark at 6am. Every colour in the app is a token that follows the phone's setting, and the dark values are this website's, to the hex, so the two never disagree. Four things never flip: Ryegrass, Welly Black, whatever is written on Ryegrass (always Welly Black), and Milk when it sits on Welly Black.

The herd boxes

Home shows the three herds as three boxes, each with a photo and a count. For one day in October they were beef red, dairy blue and sheep amber — the one place this brand had ever used a blue. They are on the palette now: a surface card, the edge outline, the label and the link in Pasture, the count in ink. The photo tells you which herd it is. A Hereford, a Holstein and a Texel need no colour code — which is the whole argument of §03 made in miniature.

The screen recipe

Aaron put three screenshots side by side on 6 October 2026. He loved two and hated one, and all three used the same outlines, slab and palette. The two he loved had one big number, one photograph and three rows. The one he hated had four monospace labels over four lists of fourteen-digit tag numbers, with the loudest thing on the screen in orange. The sticker was not the problem. The recipe was. So the recipe is now a rule.

• One number at the top that answers "do I need to do anything?" — 2 need an eye this week, not a ratio, not a label.
• A picture or a stamp beside it. The herd photo, a Ryegrass stamp with one of the 42 marks, never a wall of text.
• Three rows, four at most, each a plain title, a one-line subtitle and a figure on the right. The detail lives one tap deeper.
• Mono caps are never a heading. The mono eyebrow is for a field label, a date or a stamp on a banner. A section over a list gets a plain heading in words a farmer would say.
• If a screen needs a mono-caps heading, it is a list, and lists live one tap down from a hub, not on it.
• Tag numbers print like the tag. The five digits a farmer says, big; the herd mark and check digit small in front. Nobody reads UK388380603174.
• Dates in words. Today, tomorrow, Thursday, 24 Oct. Never "in 7 days".
• Baler Twine only for a deadline you'll miss. A status that's fine is ink. "94 can move off" is good news and is not orange.

In the app this is Heading and TagNo in ui.tsx, and the Beef hub and Beef · Health screens are the reference. On the website the phone mocks follow the same recipe.

The photo card

The third sticker shape, after the lifted card and the flat card. Text on the left, a photograph filling the right half, the ink outline round both. It is flat even though it is tappable: the photo does the lifting. The mono caps word is allowed on it as a stamp on the picture, the one place mono caps may be the title. The Livestock herd boxes set the pattern; Aaron drew the Record tab in it on 6 October and it is the reference. Rules: documentary photos from our own yards, one subject, the same light and crop across a screen, never stock. Cards sit at herd-box height so the four daily actions are above the fold; a photo card list is the exception to "three rows", because each row is a picture. In the app it is PhotoCard.

Still true from v1.3

• One screen, one job. Every screen answers a single question or records a single thing. If a screen needs a tutorial, tooltip or second glance, it goes back to the drawing board. Recording flows finish in under fifteen seconds; the farmer can always speak instead of type.
• App: Milk ground in light mode, Welly Black in dark; one Ryegrass primary action per screen (the "big green button"); 56dp+ touch targets; labels on every tab. Dark mode is first-class — yards are dark at 6am.
• Buttons: primary = Ryegrass fill, Welly Black text, 12px radius; secondary = outlined Welly Black/Milk; destructive = Baler Twine outline. Never a chartreuse outline on white.
• Notifications: lead with the fact, end with the action. "Calf 300642: passport window closes Friday → Register now."
• Website: Welly Black hero with Ryegrass headline accents, Milk content sections, the tag motif as section punctuation. Whitepaper and brand book live at farmhq.ai/whitepaper and farmhq.ai/brandguidelines, styled as this document is.
• Merch & field: the brand was born for a hi-vis vest, a mart-board sticker and an ear-tag-shaped keyring. Welly Black garments, Ryegrass print — never the reverse on safety-adjacent kit.

What exists

What changed, and why

v1.5 adds the screen recipe and the photo card to §08. One big number, a picture, three rows, lists one tap down, mono caps never as a heading, tag numbers printed like the tag, dates in words, orange only for a deadline you'll miss. It came from Aaron's reaction to three screenshots on the same day the sticker rules were written, and it is the rule the sticker rules were missing: what goes on the screen, not just how it's drawn.

v1.4 · October 2026

Version 1.3 was written in August, before most of the product existed. By October the app had fifty-six screens and the book and the product had drifted apart in six places. v1.4 closes the gap rather than pretending it isn't there. The full audit is in the repo as BRAND-AUDIT-2026-10.md.

• The display face is now the one that ships. Intro Rust was never licensed and never used; Alfa Slab One has been on every surface since the first build. It's official, and it's never bolded.
• Forty-two icons, generated from one file. Nineteen existed; one of them, the clipboard, carried a fifth of the product. The set now covers what the app actually does, and the page and the sprite can't drift from the app.
• Dark mode exists. Promised in four places since August. Now real in the app, with token values copied from this site's own dark CSS.
• The sticker is written down. The app's hard offset shadow, press-sink and tag badge had no rules. §08 gives them rules, and a radius and spacing scale.
• The herd boxes are on the palette. Red, blue and amber lasted a day. The photos do the job; the six colours stay six.
• The checklist tells the truth. Photography and duotones exist; Intro Rust is gone; dark mode is done.

Image rights

All cover images, illustrations and photography on farmhq.ai are © FarmHQ, all rights reserved, unless a source is credited directly on the page. They are not licensed for reuse, republication or redistribution. To ask about using one, email hello@farmhq.ai.