Relay is the irreducibly human moment between AI’s automation and a builder’s confusion. The mark is calm. The voice is plain. The dot is the promise. This document codifies what the brand looks like, sounds like, and does not do, so that everyone who builds for Relay builds it the same way.
Read this once. Everything else in this document follows from it. If a design, a line of copy, or a feature decision contradicts the essence, it’s wrong, even if it looks great.
One tap. One software engineer. One promise, a real person, by name and face, joins in seconds and stays through launch.
Relay restores the human half of SaaS. Not a chatbot, not a forum, not a marketplace. A software engineer who stays from build to shipped to running.
We sound like a software engineer at a whiteboard, not a tech company at a launch event. No exclamation marks. No “revolutionize.” No emoji.
The mark is a word and a dot. RELAY set in uppercase sans, tracked open, with a single perfect circle in Relay Green sitting one space after. The word is the company. The dot is the press. Together they are the entire system.
The palette is two warm neutrals and one earned green. Green is reserved for the dot, for state changes the user caused (“Engineer joined”), and for the act of human contact. Never decorative. If you find yourself reaching for green, ask whether a human is involved.
On any given screen: 80% cream / paper as background, 15% ink as type and structure, 5% green as the moment of human contact. If your green creeps above 5%, you’re using it as decoration, not as meaning.
Display and body in Source Serif 4, the editorial serif that mirrors anthropic.com’s house feel, calm, authoritative, no flourishes. UI and eyebrows in Inter, the neutral grotesque that sits quietly behind the type. Mono in JetBrains for code and numerical labels. Three families. Done.
font-variant-numeric: tabular-nums on stat blocks so digits align column-to-column.Pricing · 03Imagine a software engineer explaining the product to a friend on a Sunday walk. That’s the register. Direct, slightly understated, occasionally dry. We never sell, we describe what is true. The product does the convincing.
Words that come from how the work actually feels. Specific, concrete, drawn from the user’s mouth.
Boilerplate B2B vocabulary. If a competitor could say it, we don’t.
Sentences are short. Paragraphs are short. White space is part of the message.
Buttons, the press-for-a-human button, the engineer card, the modality toggle, and the numbered tile. Everything else is composition. Resist adding a sixth.
Primary CTA in body sections. Pill, 40px tall.
Reserved for the act of summoning a human.
Secondary action. Always paired with a primary.
The single most important component. Used once per screen, max. Pulses on hover. Means something.
Every section starts with vast top-padding and an eyebrow. Content sits in a 1200px max-width container with 32px gutters. Headlines don’t fill the column, they wrap intentionally, around an idea.
Sections breathe. Top padding is 100–128px. Anything tighter feels like marketing software, not editorial.
1200px primary container. 820px narrow container for long-form prose. 32px gutter on both sides.
Cards: 12px. Hero panels: 16px. Buttons: full pill (999). Don’t mix radii within a composition.
When we show a human, we show a real one, first name, photo, expertise. We never use stock illustration, never use 3D abstract shapes, never use AI-generated faces. The product is humans; the brand should look like it.
Engineer photos are square crops, ink-and-cream toned, with a green dot status bug at the bottom-right. Backgrounds neutral. No corporate-stock smiles.
Product UI is shown the way it actually looks, in real terminal windows, real chat threads, real code. Never “futuristic” mockups.
The dot pulses at 2s ease-in-out, ±20% scale. That motion is the brand. Reserve it for active “a human is here” states.
Transitions are 200ms, ease-out. Page changes are instant scroll-to-top. We don’t do parallax, we don’t do scroll-triggered reveals, we don’t do auto-playing video.
A product’s vocabulary is part of its design. Get the words right once, and every team uses them the same way forever.
Relay is an independent company. We don’t lead with org charts, parent companies, or anyone’s logo but our own. The brand stands on the press, the engineer, the moment of relief.
“Relay TechnoForge, Inc., independent.” That’s the full corporate line. Anything more belongs in legal, not on the page.
Investors and partners are mentioned where it’s honest to mention them, never as a credibility crutch in the marketing surface. The press and the engineer carry the brand.