Brand Guidelines — v1

Nusa

Connecting the islands

This is the visual and verbal identity for Nusa — how the palette, type, wordmark and core motif work together, and the logic behind each choice, so anything built under this name looks and reads like it belongs together.

Colour

Deep water, warm sand, one signal.

Two dark tones for the islands that don't talk to each other, one warm neutral for the moment the point lands, and a single accent — never a full background — for the thing that connects everything else.

Abyss

#0D2428

Primary dark ground. Default background for most surfaces.

Reef

#17393D

Secondary dark tone — alternate sections, cards, panels on Abyss.

Sand

#EDE6D6

The one light ground. Used for the moment that pauses to make a point.

Signal

#FF6A45

The single accent. Labels, links, connecting lines. Never a background fill.

Ink

#0B1F22

Text on Sand. Use near-black where legibility matters more than warmth.

Mist

#8FA6A3

Muted secondary text on dark grounds — captions, metadata, labels.

Typography

Three faces, three jobs.

Fraunces carries the personality in headlines and pull statements. IBM Plex Sans stays out of the way for body copy and UI. IBM Plex Mono marks anything that reads as data, label, or field note — eyebrows, tags, coordinates, timestamps.

Display

Fraunces — the problem is rarely on just one island.

400 Regular500 Medium600 Semibold500 Italic (sparingly)

Body

IBM Plex Sans — the expertise already exists inside the organisation. It just sits on different islands, speaking different languages, reporting to different people.

400 Regular500 Medium600 Semibold (UI, labels)

Mono

IBM PLEX MONO — NOW LIVE · WHAT WE DO · 06°10'S 106°49'E

400 Regular500 Medium

Wordmark

NUSA, set in Fraunces, paired with the tagline in mono.

The lockup is always the wordmark plus the tagline directly beneath it, in that order — never side by side. Signal marks the tagline; the wordmark itself is always Sand-on-dark or Ink-on-light, never coloured.

NUSA

Connecting the islands

NUSA

Connecting the islands

Minimum clear space around the lockup equals the cap-height of the wordmark on every side.
Only ever placed on Abyss or Sand — never Reef, never a photo, never Signal.
Don't recolour, outline, stretch, rotate, or add effects to the wordmark.
The tagline can be dropped in small spaces (favicons, avatars); the wordmark alone never loses its weight or spacing.

Motif

Islands, disconnected. Islands, connected.

The one recurring visual device: nodes standing for the people, teams or systems in a story, and the lines between them. Two states carry two different meanings — use them deliberately, not interchangeably.

The problem — hub and spoke

Dashed Mist lines radiating from one Signal node. Used to show the customer or employee stuck repeating themselves between islands that don't talk.

The resolution — connected mesh

Solid Signal lines, every node linked directly. Used for brand moments and closing statements — the islands, connected.

Voice

Specific beats clever.

Nusa writes the way it works — starting from the real, lived moment, not the framework. Second person when naming the reader's own experience. Short sentences that land before the explanation.

Write it this way

"You're not being difficult. You're the only one who can see the whole problem."

Not this way

"Our synergistic cross-functional methodology empowers stakeholder alignment."

In use

Where this identity already lives.

nusalab.ai and the Instagram launch series both draw directly from this system.

Website nusalab.ai

Instagram — launch Now live.

Instagram — manifesto One island at a time.