Internal reference · not indexed
Brand guide
Everything needed to produce a consistent Virtus Green document, deck or
email signature. Logo files are in /assets/brand/.
The quadrat
The mark is a quadrat: the square sampling frame that is the basic instrument of botanical survey. Its cells are filled to a deliberately uneven ascending profile — a recorded baseline, not a growth arrow — with one cell at the top right in lichen green: the measurable increment. Quadrat plus increment is the practice in one glyph.
Rules
- Clear space around the lockup is at least the height of one quadrat cell on every side.
- Minimum width for the full lockup is 150 px on screen or 40 mm in print. Below that, use the mark alone.
- The increment cell is always lichen green. Never recolour it, and never fill the quadrat completely — a full quadrat means no gain.
- Do not rotate, outline, add effects to, or place the mark on a busy photograph.
| File | Use |
|---|---|
| logo-lockup.svg | Default. Dark mark on light backgrounds. |
| logo-lockup-light.svg | Reversed, for dark backgrounds. |
| logo-lockup-on-peat.svg | Reversed with the peat background baked in. |
| mark.svg / mark-light.svg | Mark alone, where the name already appears. |
| favicon.svg, icon-192/512.png | Browser and app icons. Generated; do not edit by hand. |
Colour
Peat and chalk are the whole design. The three accents are semantic, not decorative: lichen means measured gain, amber means a window is closing, and water and heath appear only in aquatic contexts and the habitat-map motif. If you find yourself using amber for emphasis, use bold instead.
Every text and background pairing in the site stylesheet has been checked against WCAG 2.2 AA (4.5:1 for body text, 3:1 for interface components). If you introduce a new pairing, check it before you ship it.
Type
| Role | Face | Used for |
|---|---|---|
| Display | IBM Plex Serif | Headings and pull quotes. Regular weight at large sizes; bold only below 24 px. |
| Body | Instrument Sans | All running text, interface labels, buttons. |
| Data | IBM Plex Mono | Eyebrows, section indices, dates, grid references, licence numbers, table headers, references. |
Plex Serif and Plex Mono are siblings from one designed family, which is why the field metadata sits typographically inside the headings rather than beside them. All three are open licence (SIL OFL 1.1) and self-hosted — there is no third-party font request on any page. Word and PowerPoint fallbacks: Georgia for display, Arial or Aptos for body, Consolas for data.
Set headings tight (−1.5% letter-spacing) and body loose (1.6 line height). Mono is always uppercase with wide tracking when used as an eyebrow, and normal case when used inside a table or reference.
How Virtus Green writes
- Name the commercial consequence, not the environmental sentiment. "Miss the window and the scheme waits a year", not "we are passionate about nature".
- Be specific to the point of being checkable. Dates, thresholds, section numbers, guidance editions. Vagueness reads as inexperience to this audience.
- Say what you cannot do. Naming the gap is the strongest available credibility signal for a new practice, and it is also true.
- British English, plain words, jargon defined on first use. Write "biodiversity net gain (BNG)" once, then BNG.
- No fake proof. No invented project counts, no stock testimonials, no client logos until a client has agreed in writing.
Rule of thumb: if a sentence would survive being read aloud to a local authority ecologist, it is on-brand. If it would make them raise an eyebrow, cut it.