Plain and sure.

Stamped on a gate

Everything in this book comes from one object: the yellow plastic tag in every animal's ear. It carries two things, a small line and a big number, in one colour, engraved flat, and it is read from across a yard. That is how FarmHQ should feel. One signal colour. Ink and paper. The important thing big, everything else small and out of the way.

The brand must look like the product is: a clean piece of software that does accounting, filing, receipts, invoicing and hardware for people who are not software people. So it borrows the discipline of the best tools (Vercel's restraint, Stripe's trust with money, Apple's space) and keeps the farm in the words, the tag and the orange.

What v2.0 retires, and why. Ryegrass lime, the slab-serif wordmark, the thick outlines, the hard offset shadows, the photo cards and the herd portraits. Together they read as a cartoon and, in a line-up, as Herdwatch. The voice, the AI doctrine, the gate-latch law and the screen recipe stay; they were never the problem.

The tag

A cattle ear tag with FARM where the herd mark sits and HQ where the number sits. Neck, pin hole, square shoulders, a body that is wider at the bottom. Solid Twine orange, ink lettering, nothing else on it. A farmer knows what it is from across the yard, and it is the one thing in agtech nobody else can draw.

Never

• Gloss, bevel, plastic highlight or a drop shadow on the tag. It is engraved flat.
• A cow, a leaf, a sun or a crown on it. The tag is the symbol; it needs no symbol of its own.
• Any green, any gradient, any outline stroke round the orange.
• The old lime tag or the slab wordmark next to the new mark, even in transition.

Download the logos

Full-size PNGs on a transparent background, with a note on how to use each one. Where a vector exists, the SVG link is in the last column: use it for print, signage, embroidery, vehicle livery and anything that gets scaled up. It stays sharp at any size and has a true cut-out pin hole.

	File	Use it for	Size	Vector
	Tag, orange	The primary mark. App icon, favicon, avatars. On paper or on ink.	1254 × 1254	SVG
	Tag, ink	One colour. Stamps, embroidery, forms.	1254 × 1254	SVG
	Tag, paper	Dark grounds only. On a white page it vanishes.	1254 × 1254	PNG only
	Lockup, orange	Mark left, wordmark right. Website header, documents.	2172 × 724	PNG only
	Lockup, ink	The lockup in one colour.	2172 × 724	PNG only
	Stacked, orange	Mark above wordmark. Print, splash screens.	1448 × 1086	SVG
	Stacked, ink	The stacked lockup in one colour.	1448 × 1086	PNG only
	Tag silhouette	The tag outline alone, for small graphic use. Not a logo on its own.	225 × 300	PNG only

There is no reversed lockup (light lettering) yet. On a dark ground, use the paper tag or the orange tag on its own.

Status, 15 October 2026: three vectors are in: the orange tag, the ink tag and the orange stacked lockup, set to exactly #FF5A1F, #111111 and #F7F7F4. They are drawn from the round-one artwork, so they match the PNGs line for line. Still raster only: the paper tag, both horizontal lockups, the ink stacked lockup and the silhouette. Still to come, per the logo brief: a reversed lockup (paper wordmark) for ink grounds. New vectors go in /assets/logo/vector/, with a link in the table above and a rebuilt zip.

Paper, ink, and one length of twine

Six values. Orange is spent like baler twine, tied round the thing that matters and nowhere else. On any screen it is allowed in exactly two places: the Record button, and a figure the farmer will lose money by missing. If you want a third, you are wrong.

Two grounds

The app sits on Paper. The website sits on Ink, from 9 October 2026, with Paper as its text and Card #1A1A18 for its cards: the same tokens, swapped, which is why the dark table below is also the website's light table. Orange keeps its two jobs on both.

No green

Green is Herdwatch's, AgriWebb's and half of agtech's. FarmHQ owns orange and black. Nothing in the product is green: not a success tick, not a "saved" dot, not a chart. Fine is ink. Done is a tick in ink. Saved is a black dot.

Dark mode

Yards are dark at six. Every token flips; orange does not. The app reads the values through semantic tokens, so no screen names a hex.

One sans, one mono, no serif

Manrope is the face: a geometric grotesk with open counters, SIL Open Font License, free everywhere. Four weights do all the work. JetBrains Mono is the register: tag numbers, dates, batch numbers, codes, and the small caps labels on a field. The wordmark in the logo is its own heavier face and is never used for anything else; it is named in the logo files when the vectors land.

• No slab, no serif, no condensed face anywhere except inside the logo itself.
• Mono is for the register, not for labels. Tag numbers, dates, batch numbers, codes. A field label is Manrope in sentence case; a heading over a list is Manrope 800 in words a farmer would say.
• Tight at display size, loose at body. Tracking tightens as size grows; body copy is never tracked.
• Numbers are tabular wherever two line up: money, weights, counts.
• Minimum 13.5 px for anything the farmer must read; 16 px for anything they must act on. Gloves and low sun.

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.
• Dates in words. Today, tomorrow, Thursday, 24 Oct. Never "in 7 days", never 2026-10-24.

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 microphone icon in an orange disc 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:

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; the words stay plain.

One weight, four sources, one set

Phosphor (MIT) in its regular weight is the base: the one open set with a cow, a barn and a tractor, and a stroke that sits between a hairline and a marker. What Phosphor lacks comes from two places, always at the same weight and round caps. Our own drawings: the ear tag, the tag with a plus, the closed tag, sheep, goat, gate, hurdle pen, vial, wand, flat cap, wheelbarrow. And, adopted on 9 October 2026 for range, marks from three open sets that share the weight: Hugeicons Free (MIT, 1.5 stroke native), Tabler (MIT) and Lucide (ISC), each rendered at our stroke. Every mark lives in the app's one icon file with its source named in the comment above it; the grid below is generated from that file.

The three herds always wear the same marks: Beef is Phosphor's cow, Dairy the milk bottle, and Sheep our side-on sheep (drawn 9 October 2026), a whole animal rather than a face so it reads at a glance beside the cow.

From Phosphor, in use: cow, syringe, receipt, barn, tractor, pound, scales, book, invoice, envelope, calendar, microphone, chat, camera, pill, folder, signpost, clock, cloud, house, file, clipboard, calculator, identification card, list checks, mobile, download, magnifying glass, check, cross, plus.

• One weight everywhere. Mixing weights is what makes a product look stitched together. Thin, bold and fill are not used, from any of the four sources.
• Animals face the camera. The cow, sheep, goat and pig are heads, not side views; a side view at 24 px is a blob with legs.
• Never an emoji in the product. Never a filled icon to mean "selected"; selection is Ink against Flint.
• Adding a mark: Phosphor first; then the three sets, pasted as path data into the icon file with the source in the comment; a new drawing only when none of the four has it.

One number, three rows, one job

The screen recipe is the rule that survived every round of feedback, so it comes first. A screen is a hub or a list or a form, never two of those at once.

1. One number at the top that answers "do I need to do anything?": 6 need you today, 114 cattle, 5 need an eye this week. The number is the biggest thing on the screen.
2. Three rows, four at most, each an icon in a disc, a plain title, one line under it, a figure on the right and a chevron. The detail lives one tap deeper.
3. If a screen needs a mono-caps heading, it is a list, and lists live one tap down from a hub.
4. Tag numbers print like the tag. Herd mark and check digit small, the last five digits big. Nobody reads UK388380603174.
5. Dates in words. Today, tomorrow, Thursday, 24 Oct. The date picker is a scroller, never a text box.
6. Orange in two places. The Record button, and a figure that costs money if missed. Everything else is ink.
7. No photographs in the app. Icons carry meaning; photographs carried decoration. The Record tab is seven icon rows. The herds are three icon tiles.
8. The farmer never does what the app can do. Movements file themselves and say Done. A standstill is said where it bites, on the movement screen, not on Home.

The parts

Buttons

Record a treatmentLater

Record: the tag, the only orange button in the app

The number

5

need an eye this weekManrope 800, tightest tracking. Twine as text when it is a loss or a deadline.

Rows

TB testLast test 22 Aug4 can't move

WeightsDaily gain, by group482 kg

Chips and the tag badge

BEEFDAIRYUK 388380 6 03174

The orange tag badge is only ever an animal's own number, on its own page. Everything else is an outlined chip.

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.
• Joe drafts. You confirm. Nothing reaches BCMS, HMRC or the books without the farmer's tap. The confirm step is the product, not a hurdle.
• Offline is the default. Everything saves on the phone first and says so: "Saved on phone." A spinner that implies loss is a bug.
• Undo, not "are you sure?".

Photographs are for the website, not the app

The product is its own illustration: the website shows real screens from the shipping build, never drawn mock-ups. The mark before a section title on the site is the tag's pin hole, a 14 px ring in Ink, not a chip. Inside the app there are no photographs. Outside it, photography is documentary: overcast British light, mud, a Hereford looking back at the camera, a gloved hand on a syringe, a tractor in a barn doorway. One subject, the same grade across a set, never stock with a smile. A set of ten in this style exists in Visuals/app-photos-generated/ and on the website.

• No illustration, no mascots, no cartoon cattle, no clip art.
• Charts are Ink bars on Paper with one Twine bar for the thing that matters. No gradients, no 3D, no green.
• Screenshots in marketing are the real app, on a real phone frame, on Paper or Ink, never floating on orange.

The state of things

What changed, and why

Three people in a week said the same thing: too cartoonish, too much green, too much like Herdwatch. Before the App Store launch we rebuilt the brand from the one object nobody else owns, the ear tag, and from the discipline of the products farmers already trust with money.

• The logo is a tag with HQ on it. Drawn to a written brief with three specs; the literal tag won. The first three vectors arrived on 15 October; the rest, and a reversed lockup, are to come.
• Ryegrass lime is gone. Twine orange #FF5A1F takes its one job, and one job only. Nothing in the product is green.
• Alfa Slab One is gone. Manrope for everything, JetBrains Mono for the register. The wordmark keeps its own face inside the logo.
• The sticker is gone. No thick outlines, no hard shadows, no press-sink. A 1 px edge and an 18 px radius.
• Photos are out of the app. The photo card, the herd portraits and the Record photos are replaced by icons on discs.
• Phosphor replaces the 42. One weight, nine of ours drawn to match.
• The screen recipe is the first rule of §08, not an afterthought, and it gains "orange in two places" and "no photographs".
• Voice, AI doctrine and the gate-latch law are unchanged. They were right.
• 9 Oct: the website moved onto Ink end to end, homepage first (the phone in a hand, type that rises line by line, numbers that count) and then every sub-page through the shared sheet; the Record button became the logo's own tag shape, filled orange, field labels went to sentence case, and the website swapped drawn mock-ups for the real app with the pin hole as its section mark. The quiet half of the brief had been delivered without the quirk; the tag is the quirk.

Earlier books: v1.5 (6 Oct 2026) added the screen recipe and the photo card; v1.4 (6 Oct) made Alfa Slab One official and wrote down the sticker; v1.3 (Aug) was the original. All three described a look this one replaces.

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.