Brand
The visual identity of opensight.ch. Every value on this page was measured against the live site — not designed. Where the site is inconsistent, this page says so.
v0.2 · measured 2026-08-22 · source of truth: gitlab.com/butschinet/opensight-brandkit
The mark
An aperture ring in ink grey cut by a magenta bolt — a lens opened by a signal. It carries the observability positioning without spelling it out.
logo_black.png → 404
no mono variants
We ship two assets, raster only. No SVG of anything, no light-background lockup, no monochrome variants. The white lockup works on the live site today only because every template carries has-cover, so the header sits over a cover image rather than its default white bar. Not broken — but a single point of failure.
Clear space & minimum size
Clear space equals the height of the icon mark on every side. Minimum size: lockup 140 px wide, icon 16 px.
Never
Recolour · stretch · rotate · add shadows, glows or outlines · place the white lockup on a light or mid-tone background · re-typeset the wordmark · crop the ring or detach the bolt.
Colour · Tier A — theme tokens
Canonical and shipping site-wide.
Colour · Tier B — editorial illustration set
Already shipping in the inline SVGs on published posts; documented here for the first time.
The contrast rule
Magenta 500 is a surface colour, not a text colour — on light backgrounds.
Use it for fills, bars, buttons and large display type. For normal-size text on white, use #d1005e. On ink it measures 4.84:1 — AA, so it is safe as text on dark surfaces. The restriction is background-dependent, not absolute.
| Pair | Ratio | Verdict |
|---|---|---|
| #ff1a75 on #ffffff | 3.71 | AA large only — current link colour, below the 4.5 floor |
| #d1005e on #ffffff | 5.42 | AA — the compliant partner |
| #ff1a75 on #15171a | 4.84 | AA — safe as text on dark |
| #738a94 on #ffffff | 3.63 | AA large only — current metadata colour |
| #5b6b73 on #ffffff | 5.53 | AA — the drop-in |
| #15171a on #ffffff | 17.96 | AAA |
Two open findings on the live site. Inline article links render at 3.71:1 and metadata at 3.63:1 — both below the AA floor for normal text. Each is a one-line change in the Ghost theme. #d1005e and #5b6b73 are already in use in our illustrations, so both are reconciliations rather than new colours.
Off-palette — do not reuse
#b3164f appears as a "dark magenta" in one draft post's diagrams but exists nowhere on the live site. The shipping dark magenta is #d1005e.
Buttons
Primary action Secondary action
Typography
The brand typeface is Montserrat. It is self-hosted by the theme as a variable font (weights 100–900, woff2, latin + latin-ext, font-display: swap) and shipped site-wide on 2026-08-21. It replaced Ghost Casper's stock system stacks, which are now fallbacks only.
Sans — body and headings
Serif — defined, not applied
Mono — code
Resolved 2026-08-21. The cover .site-title previously fell back to the serif stack, so it rendered as Georgia while everything below it was Segoe UI or Roboto. Measured today, <body> carries has-sans-body and not has-serif-title, and --gh-font-heading is unset — so headings and body both resolve to Montserrat. The mixture is gone.
Decided 2026-08-21: Montserrat. Inter had been proposed on the grounds that it was already in use in our SVG illustrations. Measured, that argument did not hold: three inline SVGs on published posts declare font-family="Inter, …", but Inter is loaded nowhere on opensight.ch — no font file, no Google Fonts link, no @font-face — so those illustrations have always rendered in the system fallback, never in Inter. Montserrat also matches the wordmark, which is set in Montserrat Light.
Open finding. Those three SVGs still name a font that is not loaded. They should be reset to Montserrat, which the site now serves. Until then they render in whatever sans the reader’s OS supplies.
Voice & tone
Voice & tone is the messaging half of the brand and lives in the agile tool's brand record, not here — one source of truth, not two that have to agree. In one line:
Conversational, grounded, unhyped. Confident about what works, equally candid about what doesn't. First person singular for hands-on deep-dives, plural for company positioning. No superlatives about our own work. Precise versioning over vague recency — "Strimzi 0.48", never "recent".
Usage rules
- No recolouring. The palette is fixed — use the tokens.
- No effects on the mark: no shadows, glows, outlines, gradients or 3-D treatments.
- No typeface substitution in the wordmark.
- Respect the contrast floors. A colour marked AA-large is not a body-text colour.
- Do not invent variants. A missing asset is a gap to fill deliberately in the kit, not something to improvise per use.
Brand usage questions: info@opensight.ch
Assets © OpenSight, Roman Hüsler. Third parties may use the unmodified logo to refer to OpenSight; anything else needs a word first.