About / Brand
Our brand
How ALDBRN looks, sounds and holds itself together. These guidelines cover the mark, colour, type and voice, and the principles everything else is built on.
01
The mark
Aldebaran is Alpha Tauri, the brightest star in Taurus and the eye of the bull. The mark is a bull’s eye built from that idea, in four parts, always assembled from the outside in, so it ends on the star at the centre.
01
The outer ring
A heavy ring that sets the bull’s eye, left open at the upper left.
02
The follower
The gap holds a single point: the Pleiades, the cluster Aldebaran follows across the sky.
03
The inner ring
A light ring closer in: the focus, narrowing towards the centre.
04
The star
The bull’s eye itself. A four-point star at the centre is Aldebaran, in signal amber because the star is orange to the eye.
Lockups
Horizontal lockup on light and dark, stacked lockup, and the one-colour mark (with its compact form) for amber grounds. In the horizontal lockup the mark is 1.75× the wordmark’s size, with 0.6× of it between them.
02
Construction & space
Keep clear space of a quarter of the mark’s width on every side: 16 units on the 64-unit grid. In the lockup, measure it from the mark and the wordmark’s outer edges.
- Grid
- 64 × 64 units, centred at 32, 32
- Outer ring
- radius 26.5, stroke 5
- Opening
- 38°, centred at the upper left (225°)
- Pleiades
- radius 3.25, on the outer ring’s path
- Inner ring
- radius 17, stroke 2.5
- Star
- reach 11.5, concave sides
Minimum size
- Mark
- 24 px on screen, 8 mm in print
- Compact mark
- 16–23 px. The inner ring is dropped, and this is the favicon
- Lockup
- 96 px wide on screen, 30 mm in print
Don’t
Don’t close the outer ring or move the Pleiades out of the gap.
Don’t rotate the mark. The opening always sits at the upper left.
Don’t recolour the star outside the signal amber, or tint the rings.
Don’t stretch, outline, add shadows or set the mark on a busy image.
03
Colour
Values shown are the light theme. In dark mode the same tokens shift so the amber stays legible; always use the token, not the hex, in product code.
Ink
#0C0C09 · --foreground
Text, the mark’s rings on light grounds
Paper
#F8F8F5 · --background
Page ground; the mark’s rings on dark grounds
Signal
#E38500 · --accent-signal
The star, primary buttons. One signal per view
Signal ink
#9A4C00 · --accent-signal-ink
Amber text and rules that must pass contrast
Evidence
#255C75 · --evidence
Annotations on evidence in previews only
Stone
#656550 · --muted-foreground
Secondary text, captions
04
Typography
Three families, each with one job.
Display & wordmark · Playfair Display
Understand the system before you act.
Headlines, quotes and the wordmark. Weight 500 for headings, 600 tracked +0.2em uppercase for ALDBRN.
Text · Noto Sans
A diagram can show a connection without explaining why it exists.
Body copy, interface text and buttons. Buttons and labels are uppercase, tracked +0.1em.
Data · Geist Mono
PLC-02 · 10.0.4.21 · port 502
Addresses, identifiers and values inside concept previews. Never for prose.
05
Voice
We write the way a careful colleague explains a plant: plainly, specifically, and honest about what we don’t know yet.
We do
- Say what the product is and what it isn’t.
- Label anything illustrative as illustrative.
- Prefer a concrete example to an adjective.
- Write short sentences in British English.
We don’t
- Promise outcomes, certifications or protection.
- Invent numbers, customers or awards.
- Use hype: “revolutionary”, “AI-powered magic”, “unlock”.
- Imply a learning exercise grants permission on a real site.
06
Design principles
What we’re holding ourselves to. Every page, product screen and sentence should be checkable against these.
Why ALDBRN
Because OT solutions owe this to the people who use them.
Reasoning over recall
The exercise asks what the evidence tells you, what it doesn’t, and what you would need to establish next.
Made where IT and OT meet
For security people learning the industrial context, and plant people building networking and security knowledge.
Something you keep
Each exercise ends in one learning memo: the explanation, the corrections, and the questions worth remembering.
Uncertainty stays visible
An incomplete clue is recorded as incomplete, not turned into a confident answer.
How we work
The rules we hold ourselves to while the first release is in development.
Start narrow
One focused scenario and one practical question before anything broader.
Real situations, for training
Scenarios can follow a real plant’s situation, including its topology. They are training exercises, not a way to run the plant.
Label what is illustrative
Concept previews and example scenarios say what they are, wherever they appear.
Say what it isn’t
Not a monitoring tool, not incident response, not a certification, and not a way to change live equipment.
What we believe
The ideas underneath the product.
Understand the system before you act
Finding something and understanding it are different tasks. The second one is where the risk is.
A good question beats a confident guess
Knowing who can confirm a detail is often worth more than asserting it.
Authority stays with the site
A learning exercise never grants permission. Real changes belong to a site’s authorized people and procedures.
Understanding should outlast the person
The broader ambition is to make hard-won understanding easier to retain and share.
