In My Head — Brand Guidelines
Identity assets and source palette for In My Head, as literal brand constants.
This document defines In My Head’s identity assets — name, positioning, and source palette — as literal brand constants.
It complements the visual design doc, which defines how this same palette becomes an accessible in-app Material 3 colour system. The swatches here are unadjusted brand constants for the icon, splash screen, and marketing use; the visual design doc’s tonal derivatives are what actually appears in interactive UI.
- Status
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Name, palette, icon, and wordmark finalized
Name
In My Head
Rationale
A simple, direct phrase rather than a blended compound — deliberately avoiding the fusion-name process that took many iterations for Treeger. It doesn’t describe the mechanism (voice, notes, recording); it describes the moment the app actually serves — getting a fleeting thought out before it’s gone, which is the real problem behind the walkthroughs, feature ideas, and bug descriptions this app captures.
Positioning
Draft, pending confirmation:
The place a fleeting thought goes before it’s gone.
Ties directly to the original problem statement: existing tools either need an active input field, cut off mid-thought, cap recording length, or don’t exist natively on Android at all. In My Head exists so nothing said out loud gets lost.
Brand palette
| Role | Value | Use |
|---|---|---|
Primary identity colour |
|
Icon, splash, principal marketing accent |
Secondary identity colour |
|
Supporting brand accent |
Tertiary identity colour |
|
Supporting brand accent |
Reserved accent |
|
Used sparingly; not a dominant identity colour |
These are literal, unadjusted swatches — not the accessibility-tuned tones used inside the app itself. See the visual design doc for that derivation.
Icon
Final artwork: docs/assets/in-my-head-logo.svg.
An "IMH" monogram (In My Head’s initials) built from voice/audio motifs rather than plain letterforms:
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I — a dot above a stem, reading as both the letter and a microphone (capsule + handle). Primary pink-red, since it’s the most prominent element and doubles as M’s first leg.
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M — four more bars in a tall-medium-short-medium-tall rhythm (the classic two-peaks-one-valley M silhouette), reading as both the letter and an audio equalizer. Secondary blue.
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H — M’s last leg doubles as H’s first leg (the same shared-stroke economy the design already uses between I and M), a second leg completes it, and a small dot between the two legs stands in for the crossbar rather than a literal bar. Secondary blue.
Background is the computed neutral surface/background token from the visual design doc (light scheme: #FFF8F7), not an arbitrary colour — the bars already carry the brand colour, so the background stays quiet rather than competing with them.
Earlier iteration used a wave-shaped crossbar for H and a darker, non-token background; both were dropped after testing at realistic icon sizes (48px, 24px) showed the wave and the subtle bar-height variation of an earlier 4-bar M blurring into an undifferentiated cluster. The current shapes (bold strokes, wide spacing, a dot instead of a curve) were chosen specifically because they survive downscaling better.
Typography
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Wordmark — Comfortaa (Google Fonts), bold. Chosen for its consistent geometric roundness — closest match to the icon’s own "smooth curve" character, particularly in the shapes of the a and d.
docs/assets/in-my-head-wordmark.svgis the final outlined source for static use. The app also bundles Comfortaa for live instances of the literal name In My Head. -
Body / UI text — Baloo 2 (Google Fonts). Its rounded character is close enough to Comfortaa to make the app feel coherent while remaining the family for all ordinary Material text.
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Wordmark colour — a single neutral ink, never a red/blue split.
docs/assets/in-my-head-wordmark.svgis the light-surface variant,#22191A, exactly the light scheme’sonSurface/onBackgroundtoken.docs/assets/in-my-head-wordmark-dark.svgis the dark-surface variant,#F0DEDE, the dark scheme’sonSurfacetoken. Both remain transparent; they do not acquire a separate container behind them.
Comfortaa and Baloo 2 are bundled under the SIL Open Font License 1.1. Their license texts ship in the Android app assets alongside the font resources.
Usage principles
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The final logo uses the light
surface/backgroundtoken (#FFF8F7) as its quiet rounded-square background. It is not asurfaceContainercolour. -
Keep that background on the standalone launcher/logo mark. Keep the wordmark transparent and place it directly on the surrounding surface; this avoids a needlessly boxed horizontal lockup.
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Android launcher use is the monogram only. The operating system controls the font used for the launcher label, while in-app app-name treatments use bundled Comfortaa.
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The primary pink-red is reserved for the record affordance and minimal brand emphasis — it’s not a decorative colour to spread across the identity.
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Error states, wherever they appear (in-app or in marketing/support material), use a separate standard red family — never the brand pink-red. Keeping these visually distinct matters as much in brand contexts as it does in the UI.
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Yellow stays a reserved accent only. It should never become the dominant colour in a lockup, icon, or marketing asset.