Brand
guidelines

For advisors whose books outgrew their memory, Alter remembers everything, spots who needs you today, and drafts the move.

A personal AI assistant for people whose business runs on relationships. It captures by voice, works out what is worth pushing forward, and readies it for you. You review, you send, you stay the advisor.

Financial advisors in Singapore are the first cohort. The brand is built for anyone who eats off relationships, so the category language stays wide.

People have always talked things through and scribbled them down. That is how a relationship gets remembered, and it works right up until the book outgrows the notebook. Then the note is still there and nothing acts on it.

That gap is the product. Alter keeps the talking and the scribbling, and adds the part a notebook never had: an assistant that reads what you captured, notices what matters, and readies the next move for you.

The brand shows both halves. Hand-drawn carries the warmth of the human way of remembering. The clean, fast interface carries the assistant. Warm on its own is slow, clean on its own is cold, so every surface needs both.

The App Store set, as it stands today. It is the best single reference for the whole system: chalk-marker props, one secondary ground per slide, real interface floating in the frame, Alter at the edge with something in her claws, and the assistant's own work in every card.

Two eyes and a smile, held in a pair of parentheses. Said aloud it is you. It is the face of the assistant, which is why it is the mark we reach for most and the icon on the phone.

Primary mark and App Store icon. Use it in about 60% of applications.

The face stacked over the name, in its own letterforms. For the moment someone has to learn who Alter is.

About 40% of applications. Never narrower than 120px.

Every part of the lockup is doing a job. Four of them, and each one is a decision we would make again.

In copy the name is always written AlterContacts. The drawing is a drawing.

One question settles it: does the person looking already know who we are? The symbol is not a fallback for when the lockup will not fit. They are peers, the way a familiar app is a symbol on a home screen and a name on a billboard.

Profile pictures are circles, and the lockup will not survive one. The (ü) sits in the circle the way it sits in the icon: 72% of the width, centred.

Three avatars, matching the three grounds. Never the lockup, never the crab.

The alter ego made visible: the version of you that remembers, notices what is worth pushing forward, and readies it. Drawn in marker because that is the human half of the brand; she is the warmth on an otherwise clean screen.

She works behind you, so she lives at the edge of the frame. Seasoning, never the meal.

Alter is drawn twice, and the two are the two halves of the brand. The marker form is the human half: it carries the warmth outside the product and in its quiet moments. The pixel form is the machine half: the same body reduced to what holds at 24 pixels.

Marker everywhere she is a character. Pixel wherever she is interface.

Five things never change, whatever she is doing. Every new pose is checked against them before it is approved, and every one of them is visible in this drawing.

If one of the five is off, it is not Alter. It is a crab.

Twenty-five approved poses in three families. Props for product moments, movement for corners and edges, feeling for the moments the assistant has something to say.

Use these files. New poses are generated against them and approved by Jonas before they join.

Alter sits at an edge and is usually cropped by it. Around 15 to 20% of the canvas is the norm; she can be bigger, as long as what matters on the surface stays visible.

One warm moment per surface. A second Alter is decoration.

Inside the product she shows up when the assistant has nothing to show yet or something to say. Outside it she is the warm touch on an otherwise clean composition.

If the screen is doing its job, she is not needed on it.

Our signature colour is orange. It is Alter: the eyes in the mark, the crab's whole body, and the one thing on a screen the assistant is pointing you at. Spend it there and keep everything around it quiet.

The only four colours that ever touch a mark.

Eight soft grounds that sit behind supporting work: App Store slides, social covers, decks. They give a set variety and never appear on a mark.

Primary colours go anywhere. Secondaries go only on secondary surfaces, one per surface.

The palette is rounded out by tints for interface work: chips, hover states, soft grounds behind a card. Each colour at full strength, then at 40, 24 and 8 percent over white.

Tints are for interface. A mark or Alter is never tinted.

Primary colours carry the brand when it takes centre stage: the product, the marks, the words. Most of any surface is ground, because the assistant stays in the background until it has something for you. Orange is a small, deliberate amount.

Secondary colours signal a series: one per slide, one per cover, changing between surfaces and never inside one.

If orange is more than a tenth of the frame, the assistant is shouting.

Our brand font. Narrow, chalk-like, and always in capitals. Bold carries headlines, App Store screenshot lines, video titles and section titles like the ones on this page. Regular is for the quieter lines beside them: subheads, dates, a second thought under a headline.

Marketing only, never inside the product. Always caps, including quotations.

Note: free on Google Fonts. In Slides or email, where it cannot load, use Oswald.

Our functional pair, and they only ever appear together. SF Pro is everything in the product that has to be read: body copy, buttons, lists, settings, notifications. It is the system font on iPhone, so the app reads as native and never as branded. IBM Plex Mono sets the headers that name a thing beside it: a client's name, Follow-Ups, What I Captured, the 30-second brief. In marketing, Mono also sets labels, captions, figures and file names, in caps with letter-spacing.

SF for reading, Mono for naming. Neither is ever a marketing headline.

Note: SF Pro ships with iOS and macOS; where it is unavailable, on the web, in Slides or on Android, use IBM Plex Sans. IBM Plex Mono is free on Google Fonts; fallback is SF Mono, then Menlo.

Where Agdasima comes from. Chalk lettering thrown across a real room, drawn by hand for each piece, never a font. It is the warm human half at its loudest: the hook on an ad, a title over live action, a word scribbled next to the marker crab.

Whenever the hand is welcome. One line, in caps, and it moves.

The references we shoot towards. Warm light, real Singapore rooms, cars and corridors, hands and phones, the small mess of a working day.

Put the assistant in a real room.

Lifestyle shots are of real people in real places: an advisor in the car before a meeting, on the corridor between appointments, at the kitchen counter in the morning. Warm, natural light. The interface floats into the frame as a card or a notification, and it is the only thing that is not quite real.

Never a studio white-out, never a stock desk, never a device mockup on a gradient. If the setting could belong to any software company, it is the wrong setting.

Make the app the only subject.

App demos show the product with nobody in the frame: no people, no hands, no phone. The interface is lifted out of the device and enlarged: one card, one recording pill, one of Alter's notes, floating on a soft white ground at a slight tilt. A recording moment may wash the ground orange. One plain headline in a clean sans says what is happening.

They are clean and minimal on purpose. This is the machine half of the brand, and it is where a feature is shown exactly as it works. The content is seeded, never a real client.

The working set. Outlined, 1.5-pixel stroke, rounded caps and joins, optically centred in a 24-pixel box. Most come from one family; a few from a second, chosen where the first had no fit, and redrawn to the same weight where they differ.

Outline only. No filled variants, no duotone, no two weights on one screen.

When writing on behalf of AlterContacts, every piece of communication should reflect the strategy: an assistant that takes the initiative to keep client work moving. It sells follow-through, never a list of features. The differentiated sentence is it noticed, it asked, it got the next move ready, never it took notes.

"The AlterContacts"

A cheerful, friendly peer who happens to remember everything. Glad to see you, easy to have around, honest about what it does, and precise when it matters. Every sentence has the same shape underneath: it noticed, it asked, it readied, you decide.

Two people speak for the brand and never in one piece. Jonas hosts, in builder voice: "i built", "i sat with", "i got this wrong". Alter narrates, in hers. A post, an email or a video uses one of them.

Some ways in which we write. Following these keeps the many surfaces reading as one hand, from a button label to a founder email.

Inside the app the marks are quiet and the words do the work. Pixel Alter is the only place the character is the interface, and the morning queue is the hero surface.

Outside the app the hand comes forward: chalk lettering, marker Alter, real rooms. Interface floats into live action. Every asset passes one test: does it sell an assistant that follows through, or a feature?