↓ Begin

Brand Guidelines — V1.0

Borrowed momentum.

Slingshot is an insurance carrier built inside the vertical SaaS ecosystem, using the environment around it to accelerate farther and faster than it could alone. This is the identity system that carries that idea.

01 / The Slingshot IdeaSlingshot™ — Brand Guidelines

The Slingshot Idea

Spacecraft do not carry enough fuel to reach the outer planets. They borrow the momentum of the planets themselves: fly close, let gravity bend the trajectory, and leave carrying speed the engines never produced. The maneuver is called a gravitational slingshot. It is not a metaphor chosen for decoration. It is the operating model of the company.

“We named it Slingshot after the gravitational slingshot — a technique where spacecraft use external forces to accelerate farther, faster, with less fuel. That’s exactly what we’re doing with insurance: using technology to create leverage to help our partners move faster and go further than traditional carriers ever could.”
— Ethan, Founder

“He kept thinking about the idea of using the environment around us to accelerate farther and faster than we could on our own. For Slingshot, that environment is the vertical SaaS ecosystem we are embedded insurance within. It allows us to build and scale the carrier from zero to meaningful size much faster than a traditional go-to-market motion would allow.”
— from the founding brief

Everything in this guide serves that single idea. The mark traces the maneuver. The palette holds the discipline. The typography carries the engineering. Use the system as specified and every touchpoint compounds the same story: external force, converted into velocity.

The Slingshot trajectory drawn as a field of black particles: dense at the turn, scattering at the exit — Fig. 01 — Gravitational trajectory

02 / The MarkSlingshot™ — Brand Guidelines

The Mark

The Slingshot mark is a trajectory diagram. Three parallel bands enter from the upper right, wrap a full turn around an unmarked center, and exit on the same diagonal — tighter, faster, together. The circular void at the center is the mass being orbited: the ecosystem the company builds inside. The bands are the path. The mark does not illustrate a slingshot; it plots one.

Where it comes from

The letterforms that inspired the mark come from Articulate, a display face whose bowl geometry suggested the orbit. In the primary lockup, the mark takes the place of the lowercase g in the wordmark — the one letter whose anatomy already contains a loop and a descender, resolved here as an orbit and an exit trajectory.

The display face stayed an inspiration, not a system font. The identity stands on its own typography; the mark carries the memory of the letter without borrowing its typeface. This is deliberate. A brand that dresses every layer in the logo’s costume reads as a gimmick. A brand that lets one engineered gesture do the work reads as conviction.

Anatomy

Fig. 02 — Anatomy of the mark

The orbit. Two curved bands, deep rust outside, amber inside, complete the turn around the center. They are the gravity assist: the path bending around borrowed mass.
The exit. A third band in pale peach leaves the curve at speed, straight and unbending. It is drawn longer than the entry — the craft leaves faster than it arrived.
The center. Empty by design. The mass that provides the acceleration is the partner ecosystem, not Slingshot itself. The mark never fills it.

The mark’s three artwork colors (deep rust, amber, pale peach) are fixed relationships embedded in the master files. They are logo artwork, not palette tokens. Never rebuild, re-pick, or approximate them; place the supplied files.

One mark, three duties

The identity ships in three configurations. Choose by duty, not by taste.

Variant 1 — Main ID

The primary lockup. The wordmark Slingshot set in heavy geometric lowercase with the mark integrated as the g. This is the brand at full strength: one word, one maneuver, inseparable. Use it wherever the brand introduces itself — site headers, title cards, presentation covers, campaign end frames.

Slingshot main ID positive: Carbon letterforms with the full-color mark, for light surfaces

Main ID — PositiveCarbon letterforms, full-color mark. For light surfaces: White, Warm Stone, light photography.

PNG ↓

Slingshot main ID negative: Warm Stone letterforms with the full-color mark, for dark surfaces

Main ID — NegativeWarm Stone letterforms, full-color mark. For dark surfaces: Carbon, the dark-mode ladder, dark photography.

PNG ↓

Variant 2 — Secondary ID

The horizontal lockup. The mark sits alone at the left, at full detail, beside the wordmark set with a conventional g. Use it where the integrated g would render too small to read — navigation bars, document headers, email signatures, partner co-branding rows, and any strip wider than it is tall. The secondary ID gives the mark more relative size, so it holds detail at small scale better than the main ID.

Secondary ID — PositiveCarbon wordmark, full-color mark. Light surfaces.

PNG ↓

Secondary ID — NegativeWarm Stone wordmark, full-color mark. Dark surfaces.

PNG ↓

Variant 3 — The mark alone

The trajectory by itself. Reserved for contexts where the name is already established or the space cannot carry a word: avatars, app icons, apparel, watermarks, favicons, the corner of a document that says Slingshot somewhere else. The mark alone is a privilege of recognition; do not lead with it in first-contact materials.

Logo Mark — PositiveFull-color mark, Carbon ™. Light surfaces.

PNG ↓

Logo Mark — NegativeFull-color mark, Warm Stone ™. Dark surfaces.

PNG ↓

Slingshot main ID negative shown at scale on its native Carbon ground

Negative artwork on Carbon — the lockup on its native dark ground

When full color is not available

Every configuration exists in reduced-color artwork for constrained reproduction. The logic is uniform across the set: files named light are light artwork for dark surfaces; files named dark are dark artwork for light surfaces.

1color-main-id-light.png / 1color-main-id-dark.png — the main ID rendered entirely in one color (Warm Stone or Carbon). The mark’s bands keep their separation as fine keylines. Use for single-ink print, embossing, engraving, and any surface where the full-color mark would clash or fail contrast.

1color-secondary-id-light.png / 1color-secondary-id-dark.png — the secondary ID under the same rules.

logo-mark-light.png / logo-mark-dark.png — the mark alone as a solid one-color silhouette, band separation preserved as keylines. The workhorse for etching, foil, vinyl cut, and UI contexts that demand a monochrome asset.

logo-mark-knockout.png / logo-mark-knockout-dark.png — the mark drawn in outline only: a single-weight keyline with no fills. The surface itself becomes the mark’s body. Use on texture, photography, fabric, and materials where a solid fill would sit heavy — the knockout lets the material show through. knockout is the light keyline for dark surfaces; knockout-dark is the dark keyline for light surfaces.

Logo Mark — DarkSolid Carbon, one color. Light surfaces.

PNG ↓

Logo Mark — LightSolid Warm Stone, one color. Dark surfaces.

PNG ↓

Logo Mark — Knockout DarkDark keyline, no fills. Light surfaces.

PNG ↓

Logo Mark — KnockoutLight keyline, no fills. Dark and photographic surfaces.

PNG ↓

Slingshot main ID rendered entirely in Carbon with keyline band separation

1-Color Main ID — DarkAll Carbon. Light surfaces.

PNG ↓

Slingshot main ID rendered entirely in Warm Stone with keyline band separation

1-Color Main ID — LightAll Warm Stone. Dark surfaces.

PNG ↓

Slingshot secondary ID rendered entirely in Carbon

1-Color Secondary ID — DarkAll Carbon. Light surfaces.

PNG ↓

Slingshot secondary ID rendered entirely in Warm Stone

1-Color Secondary ID — LightAll Warm Stone. Dark surfaces.

PNG ↓

Selection rule

Can the surface carry full color? Use positive or negative full-color artwork.
One ink only? Use the 1-color lockups or the solid one-color mark.
Should the material itself show through? Use the knockout keyline.
Never construct a new variant. If the situation is not covered here, ask the brand team.

03 / Logo UsageSlingshot™ — Brand Guidelines

Logo Usage

A trajectory only works if nothing interferes with it. The rules below are not ornamentation preferences; they are the minimum conditions under which the mark stays legible, ownable, and consistent across every surface it lands on.

Clear space

Define the unit x as the stroke width of the mark’s outer band. Keep clear space of at least 2x on all sides of the mark alone, and at least the height of the wordmark’s lowercase letters on all sides of the main and secondary lockups. Nothing enters this zone: no type, no rules, no icons, no page edges, no other marks. When in doubt, give it more room. The mark earns attention by having space to move through, not by touching things.

Fig. 03 — ClearspaceX = x-height of the wordmark’s lowercase letters

Minimum size

The mark’s three bands are its identity. Below a certain size they merge, and the mark stops being a trajectory and becomes a smudge. Observe these floors:

Main ID: no smaller than 140 px wide on screen, 35 mm in print.
Secondary ID: no smaller than 120 px wide on screen, 30 mm in print.
Mark alone, full color: no smaller than 32 px tall on screen, 10 mm in print.
Favicon and app-icon sizes (below 32 px): use the solid one-color mark (logo-mark-light.png / logo-mark-dark.png), whose keylines survive small rendering better than three color fields.

Min 140px screen / 35mm print

Min 120px screen / 30mm print

Min 32px screen / 10mm print

Fig. 04 — Minimum sizeSpecimens at true pixel size

Backgrounds

Light surfaces (White, Warm Stone, light imagery): positive artwork. Carbon letterforms, full-color mark.
Dark surfaces (Carbon, the dark-mode ladder, dark imagery): negative artwork. Warm Stone letterforms, full-color mark.
Photography: place the lockups only where the image holds a quiet, consistent field — deep shadow or clean sky, never texture with competing detail. If the image cannot offer that field, use the knockout keyline mark and let the photograph become the fill, as in the apparel application.
Color fields: never place the full-color mark on ambers, oranges, or rusts that neighbor its own artwork colors. On those fields, use the one-color artwork in Carbon or Warm Stone, whichever passes contrast.

Positive lockup on a White ground — On White / Warm Stone — positive

Negative lockup on a Carbon ground — On Carbon / dark — negative

On photography — one-color light on dark imagery

Fig. 05 — Backgrounds

Never

Never rotate the mark. The exit trajectory is drawn at its angle for a reason; changing it changes the physics.
Never recolor the bands, and never rebuild them from palette tokens.
Never separate the exit band from the orbit, or use a single band alone.
Never fill the center of the mark.
Never stretch, compress, shear, or add perspective.
Never add drop shadows, glows, bevels, or gradients to the artwork.
Never set the wordmark in another typeface and reattach the mark as a g.
Never place positive artwork on dark surfaces, or negative artwork on light ones.
Never outline the solid versions or thicken the knockout keyline.
Never crowd the clear space — no type, rules, or icons inside the zone.

04 / ColorSlingshot™ — Brand Guidelines

Color

The palette is small on purpose. Two neutrals do the structural work, one accent carries the signal, and everything else is surface hierarchy. The discipline mirrors the visual language: black, white, and a punch of color. The system is digital-first; values are specified as hex and validated against WCAG contrast. No print equivalents are defined at this time — for print work, supply the hex values to the printer and proof against screen.

Token	Hex	Role
Carbon	`#1C1C1E`	Primary text, headers, anchoring surfaces
Warm Stone	`#F5F0EB`	Page backgrounds, neutral surfaces
Signal Amber	`#D97706`	CTAs, links, highlights
Deep Gray	`#3A3A3C`	Secondary text, borders
White	`#FFFFFF`	Cards, elevated surfaces

Carbon

HEX #1C1C1E RGB 28 28 30 Primary text · headers · anchor surfaces 14.8:1 AA

Near-black, never pure black. The color of the system’s structure: headlines, body text, and the surfaces that anchor a layout. Warmth lives in the stone, not the ink.

Warm Stone

HEX #F5F0EB RGB 245 240 235 Page backgrounds · neutral surfaces

The default page. A warm neutral that keeps the system human where a cold gray would read as laboratory. Most of the brand, most of the time, is Carbon on Warm Stone.

Signal Amber

HEX #D97706 RGB 217 119 6 CTAs · links · highlights 4.6:1 AA

The single punch of color. Amber marks the thing that matters: the action, the link, the highlighted node. Its power is rationed — if amber appears more than once per view, it usually appears once too often.

Deep Gray

HEX #3A3A3C RGB 58 58 60 Secondary text · borders 10.4:1 AA

The quiet middle: secondary text, borders, dividers. Deep Gray does hierarchy so Carbon does not have to shout.

White

HEX #FFFFFF RGB 255 255 255 Cards · elevated surfaces

Elevation. Cards and raised surfaces sit in White against Warm Stone, and the difference between the two is the shadow system.

Warm Stone 60 Carbon 20 White 15 Amber 5

Fig. 06 — System balanceAmber is a signal, rationed by design

Dark mode

Dark mode is not an inversion; it is a re-anchoring. The background is #121214 — near-black, never pure black. Surfaces climb a fixed ladder: #1C1C1E → #2C2C2E → #3A3A3C, each step one level of elevation. Signal Amber elevates to #F59E0B in dark contexts to hold its energy against the deeper field.

Signal Amber elevates on dark — #D97706 → #F59E0B

Contrast

All primary pairings meet WCAG AA:

14.8:1 AA Carbon on Warm Stone — 14.8:1
10.4:1 AA Deep Gray on White — 10.4:1
4.6:1 AA Signal Amber on White — 4.6:1

Amber on White passes AA for large text and UI components; do not set body copy in amber. Amber is a signal, not a voice.

Logo artwork colors

The mark’s deep rust, amber, and pale peach are artwork, embedded in the production files, tuned for the mark alone. They are not palette tokens and never appear in UI, charts, or layout. The one shared instinct is the accent: where the mark uses amber to carry motion, the interface uses Signal Amber to carry action. The relationship is conceptual, not chromatic — do not sample colors out of the logo.

05 / TypographySlingshot™ — Brand Guidelines

Typography

Three typefaces, three jobs, no overlap. Display type states the idea. Body type explains it. Mono type proves it with the numbers. All three ship on Google Fonts, which keeps the system reproducible anywhere without licensing friction. And none of them is the face that inspired the mark — the display letterform that shaped the g stays inside the logo, so the identity stands on its own typography.

Space Grotesk — 600 / 700Display & headlines — Google Fonts

Borrowed momentum, engineered into an identity.

Headlines and display settings only. Geometric precision, squared terminals: the voice of the engineering. If it is larger than a paragraph, it is Space Grotesk.

Inter — 300 / 400 / 500Body & UI — Google Fonts

Body text holds a 65 to 75 character measure, sits at a 1.5 line height, and never drops below 16 pixels on mobile. Set this way, a page of specification reads as calmly as a page of prose, and the system explains itself without raising its voice.

Everything read at length: paragraphs, labels, navigation, forms. Inter disappears into the reading, which is its job.

JetBrains Mono — 400 / 500Code & data — Google Fonts

CARBON #1C1C1E WARM STONE #F5F0EB SIGNAL AMBER #D97706 DEEP GRAY #3A3A3C WHITE #FFFFFF

Figures, tables, tokens, code. Ligatures disabled — every character stays itself, because in data, substitution is corruption.

Scale

StepSizeWeightNotes

Display3.063rem700letter-spacing −0.02em

3XL2.441rem—

2XL1.953rem—

XL1.563rem600

LG1.25rem600

Base1rem400line-height 1.5

SM0.813rem—

XS0.688rem500letter-spacing +0.05em

Code0.875rem—JetBrains Mono

Fig. 07 — Type scale

Rules

Never interchange typeface roles. Space Grotesk does not set paragraphs; Inter does not set display.
Body text is at least 16 px on mobile.
No more than three weights per page.
Never center body text.
No italics anywhere in the system.
Hold a 65–75 character measure on reading text.
Apply text-wrap: balance to headings.

06 / The Architecture BeneathSlingshot™ — Brand Guidelines

The Architecture Beneath

The creative direction is called The Architecture Beneath: precise, confident, deep, engineered, structural. Its theme is data as art. Insurance is a data business, and this brand treats that data the way an engineer treats a cross-section — worth looking at, worth drawing well, never simplified into decoration. The images in this language do not try to be readable first. They try to generate curiosity, and they never lose the relationships inside the data while doing it.

Data as art. The relationships in the data are never lost, and the representation honors them. Density is not the enemy; condescension is. An elegant rendering of complex data outperforms a simplified chart that respects no one.
Affected just enough. The discipline is in the restraint — do less, on purpose. Take a strong, simple form and push it exactly one step, to the point where it becomes ownable, and stop. This is how the mark was built, and it is how everything else should be built.
One punch of color. Black, white, and a single accent. A field of carbon nodes with one amber point tells a story; ten accent colors tell none. When one data point is the story, let one data point be the color.
Reward the second look. The best marks are geometric at first read, then reveal themselves. Compositions should do the same: what reads as noise resolves into structure — the way actuarial data does when it is rendered honestly.
Human and data at once. The brand shows people surrounded by the layers of data they carry — a data layer over an iris, orbits around a portrait. Dimensionality without abstraction. What we see as beauty and what data can represent as beauty are the same thing.
Letters made of our material. The secondary typographic gesture is typography built from data nodes — the same dots that plot the data spell the words. Zoomed in, it is type; zoomed out, the data becomes the subject. No competitor set owns an execution like it.

Photography and texture

Surfaces are dark, structural, and specific: infrastructure detail, engineering cross-sections, precision materials, dark minimal data visualization. Light is directional and earned, never ambient and flattering. When people appear, they appear with their data — layered, dimensional, particular — not as stock talent at desks.

Avoid

Blue gradients
Friendly-startup illustration
Colorful decorative graphics
Stock office photography

Reference: a data poster of fine vertical bars in grays and scattered color, dense but elegant — Ref 01An early ancestor. An elegant simplicity that honors the density of what is shown. One of the earliest expressions of what this brand can become.

Reference: an annual report spread with a circular black and white network diagram and one punch of red — Ref 02The annual report. Circular, black and white, one punch of color. Not trying to be readable — trying to be beautiful, without losing a single relationship.

Reference: a white cover scattered with black dots and a single bright accent node — Ref 03The highlighted node. White canvas, black dots, one accent node. What it looks like when one data point becomes the story.

Reference: a dark poster of dot matrices charting a week of activity, noise resolving into structure — Ref 04Actuarial beauty. What reads first as noise reveals itself as structure. The job of the image is curiosity, not explanation.

Reference: letters built entirely from small dots on a silver industrial cover — Ref 05Typography built from nodes. Letters made from the same dots that plot the data. The start of an ownable type gesture.

Reference: a circular black star map with fine white nodes and labels — Ref 06Circular mapping. The minimalism carried across the entire system: relationships shown without chrome.

Reference: a portrait seen from behind, sliced into layered strips that carry the figure's data — Ref 07Layered humanity. A portrait carrying its layers of data. Dimensionality without abstraction.

Reference: an extreme close-up of an iris with annotation type at the frame edges — Ref 08The iris, close. The accent color inside a human frame; discovery that is human and data at once.

07 / In UseSlingshot™ — Brand Guidelines

In Use

A mark proves itself at application. These executions show the system doing its work across print, apparel, and screen — each one built from the rules in this guide, none of them requiring an exception to look right.

Fig. 08Business cards. Carbon face with the Warm Stone mark and wordmark; Warm Stone face with the Carbon mark and Inter-set details. Between them, the edge tells the story: layered stock painted in the mark’s rust and amber, so every card in the stack reads as a stratum of the trajectory. The system’s restraint on the faces earns the single flourish on the edge.

The one-color Slingshot mark between the shoulders of a black tee, with the photograph sliced along the mark's exit angle — Fig. 09Apparel. The one-color mark between the shoulders of a black tee, with the photograph itself sliced along the mark’s exit angle. The garment carries the mark; the treatment carries the velocity. Campaign photography may take the diagonal as its energy — the mark itself stays untouched.

The Slingshot main ID negative over a dark taupe gradient under soft directional light — Fig. 10Title frame, stone field. The same lockup over a dark taupe gradient under soft directional light. The quieter of the two title treatments, closer to the everyday palette; the full-color mark carries all of the color in the frame.

The Slingshot main ID negative over a deep rust-to-amber gradient falling to black at the edges — Fig. 11Title frame, ember field. The main ID negative over a deep rust-to-amber gradient falling to black at the edges. The one context where the brand’s own heat is the background — and the artwork survives it because the letterforms are Warm Stone and the mark keeps its fixed inks. For film end-cards and event screens, not for pages.

The Slingshot trajectory redrawn as a field of black nodes, dense at the turn and scattering at the exit — Fig. 12The particle orbit. The mark’s trajectory redrawn as a field of carbon nodes — dense at the turn, scattering at the exit. This is the visual language closing its loop: the logo rendered in the brand’s own material, data plotting the maneuver the company is named for. Use it as a texture and section divider, never as a replacement for the mark.

A second node-built trajectory with a looser scatter of monochrome dots — Fig. 13Particle orbit, alternate density. A second pass at the node-built trajectory with a looser scatter. Same rules: monochrome nodes, structure emerging from apparent noise, the curve legible only when you step back.

08 / AssetsSlingshot™ — Brand Guidelines

Assets

Every production file, in every configuration this guide defines. Place the files as supplied; nothing here is a template for redrawing. If a context is not covered by these files, the answer is a conversation with the brand team, not a new variant.

Download all assets (.zip)

Main ID

main-id-positive.pngprimary lockup, Carbon type, full-color mark, for light surfacesFor light grounds↓ PNG
main-id-negative.pngprimary lockup, Warm Stone type, full-color mark, for dark surfacesFor dark grounds↓ PNG

Secondary ID

secondary-id-positive.pnghorizontal lockup, Carbon type, full-color mark, for light surfacesFor light grounds↓ PNG
secondary-id-negative.pnghorizontal lockup, Warm Stone type, full-color mark, for dark surfacesFor dark grounds↓ PNG

Logo mark

logo-mark-positive.pngfull-color mark, for light surfacesFor light grounds↓ PNG
logo-mark-negative.pngfull-color mark, for dark surfacesFor dark grounds↓ PNG
logo-mark-dark.pngsolid Carbon mark, one color, for light surfacesFor light grounds↓ PNG
logo-mark-light.pngsolid Warm Stone mark, one color, for dark surfacesFor dark grounds↓ PNG
logo-mark-knockout.pngkeyline-only mark, light line, for dark and photographic surfacesFor dark grounds↓ PNG
logo-mark-knockout-dark.pngkeyline-only mark, dark line, for light surfacesFor light grounds↓ PNG

One-color lockups

1color-main-id-dark.pngmain ID entirely in Carbon, for light surfacesFor light grounds↓ PNG
1color-main-id-light.pngmain ID entirely in Warm Stone, for dark surfacesFor dark grounds↓ PNG
1color-secondary-id-dark.pngsecondary ID entirely in Carbon, for light surfacesFor light grounds↓ PNG
1color-secondary-id-light.pngsecondary ID entirely in Warm Stone, for dark surfacesFor dark grounds↓ PNG

Master artwork is maintained in the identity production file. PNGs above are supplied at production resolution; request vector exports from the brand team for signage and large-format work.

Master artwork: 100_slingshot-id-production.ai — available on request