Athlete
Orchard

Brand purpose

Athlete Orchard connects athletes, families, clubs, leagues, coaches and trainers. One home for registration, scheduling, payments and community.

Youth sports runs on five disconnected tools and a volunteer's spare evenings. The brand's job is to look like relief from that, not like another system to learn. So the identity leans calm and structural rather than loud: a deep navy that reads as dependable, a green that reads as growth, and exactly enough orange to point at the one thing that needs a person's attention.

Names, and the ones that are wrong

How to write our names, and the spellings to avoid.

Taglines

• Growing athletes. Building community. The tagline. Locks up under the logo. Two sentences, two full stops.
• One platform. Every club. Every athlete. The platform line. Marketing headers and the auth pages, never under the mark.
• Everything your club needs to grow. The sign-in headline. Says "club", not "league", deliberately.

Domain

athleteorchard.com, written without www, everywhere.

The logo

A figure with raised arms doubles as the trunk of a tree, inside an open arc, standing on a green rise. Athlete and orchard in one shape. The arc is deliberately open at the bottom: the club is not a closed circle.

Approved variations

Horizontal, full colourao-horizontal.png

Horizontal, reversedao-horizontal-onnavy-320.png

Stacked with taglineao-stacked.png

Stacked, reversedao-stacked-onnavy.png

Mark aloneao-mark.png

Mark, reversedao-mark-onnavy-512.png

On Light Graytinted surfaces only, never mid-tones

App iconao-app-icon-1024.png, square on navy, no transparency

Browser tabfavicon.ico, 16 to 48 px

Choosing one

• Light surface → full-colour horizontal. The navy wordmark carries itself.
• Navy or photographic surface → the reversed lockup. The navy wordmark disappears on navy, so this is not a preference.
• Under 120 px wide, or square → the mark alone. The tagline is unreadable below that and reads as noise.
• Email → ao-email-horizontal.png, sized for email.

Clear space and minimum size

• Clear space: the height of the "A" in ATHLETE on all four sides. Nothing enters it, including a club's own logo.
• Minimum size: 132 px wide for the horizontal lockup, 96 px for the stacked lockup with tagline, 24 px for the mark.
• Co-branding: our mark and a club's logo sit on a shared baseline, separated by a 1 px rule at 20% opacity, with the club's on the left. It is their club; we are the platform underneath it.

Colour

Five brand colours and a neutral ramp. The brand colours carry identity; the neutrals do the actual work of an interface. A screen that is 85% neutral and 15% brand is correct, not timid.

Brand core

Roles: what each colour is for

Green used to be the action colour, so every button, link, focus ring and active state was green, and the product read like every other league app. The rule now is navy acts, lime marks, orange asks, green means done. The website and the phone app name each role once and every screen asks for the role, never the colour, so the two always agree.

Neutral ramp

Proportion

A rough target for any screen: ~60% paper and neutrals, ~30% navy in chrome, type and the one or two things a person can do, ~5% green where something is done or good, ~5% lime and orange combined. Orange above about 5% stops meaning "look here"; green above about 5% stops meaning "done" and starts to look like someone else's product.

Contrast, measured

Computed WCAG 2.1 ratios, not estimates. The rule that matters most is the one at the bottom: Growth Lime and Community Orange are never text on a light surface.

Typography

Montserrat, one family, everywhere, free from Google Fonts. Headlines and interface use the same family; the difference is weight and letter-spacing, not typeface.

Rules

• Weights in use: 400 body, 600 emphasis, 700 headings in dense UI, 800 display and overlines. 500 and 900 exist in the loaded set but should not be reached for casually.
• Negative tracking scales with size. Display gets -0.028em; body gets none. Montserrat at large sizes without it looks unset.
• Line height: 1.02–1.15 for display, 1.6–1.7 for body. Never 1.4 for a paragraph.
• Measure: cap body copy near 60–70 characters. On a phone that is one column, always.
• Italic is for one emphasised word in a display headline, as in Every athlete. Not for whole sentences.
• Never all-caps a sentence. Caps are for overlines and short labels under about five words.

Brand values

Four words, and what each one obliges the product to actually do.

Voice and tone

We are talking to a volunteer treasurer at 10pm who has four other things to do. Direct, plain, specific. Lead with the answer.

Mechanics

• No em dashes. Use a comma, a colon, or rewrite the sentence. This is absolute.
• Sentence case for every heading, button and label. Not Title Case.
• Second person. "Your club", "your teams". Not "the user".
• Club, not league. The customer is a club, an organization, or a training business.
• Numbers as numerals from zero up. "3 athletes", not "three athletes".
• No exclamation marks outside a genuine congratulation. Never two.
• Name the actor in errors, and say what to do next. "Something went wrong" is not a message.

In practice

Org theming: whose colours win

A club signs in to see their club. Our brand holds the frame; theirs fills it. (The clubs below are examples.)

Where an org's colour may go

• The page banner behind the org name, as a gradient built from their primary.
• A 3 px accent rule under the banner, in their secondary.
• Team badges, jersey-colour chips, and practice-group markers.
• Chart series on their own pages.
• Their public org page and registration form, more generously than inside the back office.

Where it may not

• Primary buttons. Navy (lime in dark) means "this is the action" across every org. A club whose colour is red must not own the same slot as a delete.
• The sidebar and top bar. Neutral, always. This is the product's own furniture.
• Semantic colour. Success, warning and error belong to the system. A green club does not get a green error.
• Body text. A club with a yellow primary would be illegible, and we cannot vet every hex a director pastes in.

Light, dark, and where each one applies

The product respects a person's appearance choice. The marketing site does not, and that distinction is load-bearing.

Depth

Depth comes from layered surfaces and hairline borders first, shadow second. Three shadow steps exist and that is all: one for a resting card, one for something raised, one for a dialog. On navy, depth comes from a lighter navy plus a 1 px white border at 8–14% opacity, because a black shadow on a dark surface is invisible.

Do and don't

Logo files

Every file is a PNG at athleteorchard.com. Open one to save it; link to it rather than keeping a copy, so you always have the current one. For print and large formats, use the largest masters.

The brand colours, with their hex values, are in section 04.