# Alpha Drive AI — Brand Guidelines (v2) The brand is built on three ideas: **a muscular italic wordmark, a single red accent, and a signature horizontal slice.** Applied consistently, it stays recognizable from a 32-pixel favicon to a storefront banner. ### Why it's ownable This isn't a style preference — it's a defined system, and the constraints are what make it defensible: - **The italic wordmark** signals speed and forward motion — it reads as automotive before you've read a word. - **One red** is ownable; five accents are not. A single, fixed accent (never tinted, never gradient) is what people remember. - **A specific skew and slice** are ownable shapes competitors can't copy; generic gradients and textures make us look like everyone else. - **The white space / flat surfaces** read as confidence and quality — restraint reads premium. Every rule below exists to avoid two failure modes: looking **generic** and looking **cheap**. --- ## 1. Logo - **Primary wordmark:** ALPHA DRIVE AI — heavy italic, set in Arial Black (900) skewed -14°, with the signature horizontal slice cut. - **Lockup with tagline:** wordmark over the tagline bar (no extra red rule under the wordmark). - **Monograms:** the AD/AI icon (official, used as the favicon), Sliced A, AD plate, and ADAI plate. Use the AD/AI icon, AD plate, or Sliced A for small touchpoints and favicons. - Never re-skew, stretch, condense, recolor, or rebuild the slice in another color. - Keep clear space of at least the cap-height of the "A" on all sides. ### File formats - **SVG** — lossless, true-outline vector (font-independent; glyphs are paths, not live text). Editable, and readable as plain text by an AI agent. - **PNG** — raster at 2× / 4× / 8×, transparent background. All marks are supplied on a transparent background; the slice is true transparency, so each mark adapts to whatever sits behind it. --- ## 2. Color | Name | HEX | RGB | CMYK | Role | |------|-----|-----|------|------| | Alpha Red | `#E30613` | 227·6·19 | 0·100·100·0 | Primary — the single accent | | Deep Red | `#AA0310` | 170·3·16 | 15·100·100·15 | Shadow / slice depth only | | Ink Black | `#0A0A0C` | 10·10·12 | 0·0·0·100 | Dark surface; text on light | | Smoke | `#F2F2F0` | 242·242·240 | 0·0·1·5 | Light surface | | Paper | `#FFFFFF` | 255·255·255 | 0·0·0·0 | Canvas; text on dark | - **`#0A0A0C` is the one canonical near-black** across web, events, print, and app. It is the **default background** of this brand site; text on it is Paper (`#FFFFFF`) or Smoke (`#F2F2F0`). - Alpha Red is the *only* accent — never substitute another red, and never tint or gradient it. - Red is for accents, one-word emphasis, hairlines, and small marks — not large fills of body text. --- ## 3. Typography - **Display / wordmark:** Arial Black (900), italic, -14° skew, ALL CAPS, tight tracking. Wordmark and monograms only. - **Supporting / UI / body:** system UI stack (-apple-system, Segoe UI, Inter). Headlines 700–800 with tight tracking; body 400–500. - **Technical labels / metadata:** Courier New / monospace, tracked +2–4, uppercase. - White text on ink and black text on white are both approved for headings and body — including red as a header accent — as long as the **logo itself** is never restyled. > **Licensing the wordmark font.** The wordmark is set in **Arial Black**, a Monotype typeface (not available through Adobe Fonts). License it from MyFonts: https://catalog.monotype.com/font/monotype/arial/black — for logo/static-graphic use, buy the **Desktop** license. --- ## 4. The slice The horizontal slice is the brand's signature device — a single clean cut through the wordmark and monograms. Keep it horizontal, keep it one weight, never angle, duplicate, or recolor it. --- ## 5. Do / Don't **Do** - Use Alpha Red on white, black, or smoke backgrounds. - Keep the -14° italic skew. Never uprighten. - Use the Sliced A or AD plate for small touchpoints and favicons. **Don't** - Recolor the mark, add gradients, or stroke outlines. - Add drop shadows, glows, or 3D effects. - Stretch, squash, or re-skew the wordmark. - Place the mark on busy photography without a solid plate behind it. - Rebuild the slice cut in another color. --- ## 6. Asset index The primary **wordmark** and the **AD/AI icon** are the official outlined artwork in [`logo/`](logo/): `logo.svg` and `Icon.svg`, with PNG raster at `@0.5x`, `@2x`, and `@4x` (e.g. `logo/Logo@2x.png`, `logo/Icon@4x.png`). The supporting monograms live in [`assets/`](assets/) on a `transparent` background as a vector `.svg`, plus PNG raster at `@2x`, `@4x`, and `@8x`. Filename pattern: `__transparent.svg` and `__transparent@x.png`. | Mark | Name | SVG | |------|------|-----| | Primary wordmark | `logo` | [logo.svg](logo/logo.svg) (official) | | AD/AI icon | `icon` | [Icon.svg](logo/Icon.svg) (official) | | Wordmark + tagline | `wordmark-with-tagline` | [transparent](assets/wordmark-with-tagline__transparent.svg) | | Sliced A | `mono-sliced-a` | [transparent](assets/mono-sliced-a__transparent.svg) | | AD plate | `mono-ad-plate` | [transparent](assets/mono-ad-plate__transparent.svg) | | ADAI plate | `mono-adai-plate` | [transparent](assets/mono-adai-plate__transparent.svg) | For a supporting-monogram PNG, swap the extension and add a scale, e.g. `assets/mono-ad-plate__transparent@4x.png`. --- © 2026 Alpha Drive AI · A Dealer's Greatest Assets company · BDC experts since 1993