1. The Brand at a Glance

Positioning

Real Ink Letters writes and mails genuine handwritten letters for businesses — real handwriting, real paper, hand-folded, sealed and mailed with a real stamp. Our custom writing machine makes it scalable; the product stays human. One letter at a time or ten thousand.

The brand personality in three words: honest, warm, quietly confident. We charge more than a mailhouse and less than an agency, and we say exactly what we are: “We’re not a mailhouse for everything, and we don’t pretend to be.” That honesty is the brand. Never let copy, imagery or design become slick, corporate or anonymous — the whole product is the opposite of that.

2. Logo & Wordmark

The current logo is a text wordmark: “Real Ink Letters” set in Merriweather (serif), with the subtitle “Real handwriting. Real results.” beneath it. It lives in the site header on a navy field, in white/cream text.

• Wordmark font: Merriweather 700 (same as site headings — the serif is the brand mark).
• Colors: white or cream text on navy; never place on busy photography without a navy panel behind it.
• The gold rule (2px, 64px wide, #C4A747) is the brand’s signature divider — use it under section intros, not as a full-width border.
• A graphic/icon logo doesn’t exist yet. If one is commissioned, it must reference real materials: pen nib, envelope, stamp — not abstract swooshes.

3. Color Palette

Website palette (as coded in the theme)

Usage rules. Cream and white carry the page; navy carries authority; gold carries craft; CTA red carries action. If a design uses red for anything that isn’t a button or link-action, it’s wrong. One accent per element — no rainbow.

4. Typography

Two families, nothing else

Never introduce a third typeface. If a design needs a “special” font, it needs a better idea instead. Em dashes over hyphens for asides; sentence case headings, no Title Case.

5. Voice & Tone

The copy is the strongest brand asset we have. It sounds like a sharp, friendly person who respects the reader’s intelligence — never like marketing.

• Honest to a fault. If a claim can’t be defended, don’t make it. The 98% open-rate figure is our headline stat — use it plainly, never inflate it.
• Materials as vocabulary. “real handwriting. Real paper. Real stamp. Hand-folded.” These words recur on purpose. The trinity is the brand.
• Wry, not jokey. Light dry humor at the expense of spam and postcards, never at the customer’s expense.
• Second person, active voice, short sentences. One idea per sentence. Cut every adjective that survives without losing meaning.
• Never say “handwritten-style”, “personalized at scale” as a euphemism, or anything that implies the letters are printed facsimiles. They are genuine handwriting. That’s the company.

6. Photography & Imagery

The card style — established on the shop, extended to all 11 industries

Every product and industry card follows one recipe: a warm cream flat-lay with a handwritten letter on off-white paper as the hero, written in navy ink, plus one clearly identifiable industry prop (brass house key + SOLD sign, ceramic tooth + dental mirror, folded navy umbrella, ballot box, shopping bag, miniature solar panel…), and a off-white envelope sealed with a real postage stamp.

• Mood: soft natural window light, shallow depth of field, editorial — like a letter photographed on someone’s kitchen table, not a studio product shot.
• Palette: cream/ivory/tan with navy ink accents. Nothing loud, nothing glossy.
• Shape: square 1024×1024, rendered with 14px rounded corners wherever embedded.
• What’s banned: stock-photo handshakes, call-center headsets, clip-art envelopes, anything with a visible corporate logo, splatter/fountain-pen clichés.

Image conventions (SEO): descriptive filenames (handwritten-letters-<industry>.jpg), keyword-bearing alt text, explicit width/height, top-of-page images get fetchpriority="high", everything compressed to ~150–200KB.

7. Illustration & Mascot — Sir Penman Ink

The brand character — introduced September 2026 · canon settled September 30, 2026

Sir Penman Ink is the Real Ink Letters mascot: a personified classic fountain pen — a Victorian gentleman of the barrel, standing on his own gold nib. He personifies the promise — we write your letters — with the same personality as the copy: friendly, slightly wry, quietly confident. If the brand voice were a character, it’s him.

• The canon (never varies): navy lacquer pen barrel body with a gold nib at the base. He stands on his nib — he has no legs, ever; if legs appear, the image is regenerated. A gold-rimmed monocle on his left eye only (the viewer’s right) — never round spectacles; if spectacles appear, the image is regenerated. Black handlebar mustache, black bow tie, white gloves, warm smile.
• Style: warm vector cartoon — clean rounded outlines, friendly and scalable, logo-like quality. Never photorealistic, never clip-art, never glossy 3D.
• Palette: navy character, gold accents, single flat #faf7f0 background edge to edge (blends with the site’s paper cream). One accent per illustration, same as the UI rules.
• No text: the art carries no readable text — signs and props are wordless. Prop text is the only exception, and only when a specific placement asks for it.
• Themed poses (the “avatar” model, inspired by Yoast): the character stays identical — same monocle, mustache, bow tie, gloves — and only the props and activity change to suit the topic: a SOLD key for real estate, a tooth and mirror for dental, a ballot box for political campaigns, a calculator for mortgage. Props frame positively — a solved problem, never a tangle. The pose library grows one topic at a time, always in this exact style.
• Production pipeline: generate from an existing canon image as the reference plus the canon prompt; visually verify before use (monocle on the left eye, no legs, no readable text); keep the flat background, or flood-fill it transparent for figure placements (tolerance 22, pad 12); display at 375px height, centered; swap the page figure and the featured image together; keyword-bearing alt text on every placement.
• Where he appears: content pages, industry pages, every blog post’s featured art, social and email. He does not appear in checkout, transactional emails or legal pages — he is a storyteller, not a UI element.

8. UI Patterns

Order letters for your farm →

↑ The button. This exact one. Everywhere.

9. Do & Don’t