Brand

General Translation's identity, laid out for anyone who has to build with it, including our partners at basement studio. This document is the written canon. The living version is the /brand page, and the visual laws live in DESIGN.md.

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1. The nameCopy Anchor Link

General Translation was chosen deliberately, in this order:

1. Ambition. Like General Motors or General Electric, the name says we intend to be the trustworthy, technologically innovative number one in the category, an enterprise in the old sense.
2. Generality. A reference to "artificial general intelligence": general AI models outperform specific translation models because they understand context and can be directed.
3. Distinction. Every other localization company seemed to begin with an "L".

The naming systemCopy Anchor Link

2. The ideaCopy Anchor Link

Every product in every language. Native-level speed and quality, from day one. That's the whole thesis, executed insanely hard.

The positioning: the Vercel of localization. Two halves designed together: open-source developer tools (the Next.js of the analogy: the gt libraries) and closed-source infrastructure (the Vercel: context-aware translation APIs, versioning, editing, integrations, agents) that is the best-in-class way to use those tools. Because we build the entire stack, we can promise what point solutions can't: consistent, high-quality translation across a whole business, integrated in an afternoon.

Two registers, one family: the open source should feel community-owned; the platform should feel enterprise-grade.

The values, which the visual identity must carry:

• Engineering-first. Built by people with deep technical roots, for the world's best engineering teams.
• Craft. We care about the difference between drawn-once and drawn-twice lines. That is literal: see the line law in DESIGN.md.
• Infrastructure-grade. Reliable, fast, secure. The brand should feel like something an enterprise stands on, not an app it tries.
• Cosmopolitan. Urbane, sophisticated, connecting the world and its languages. Language is our material, not just our market.
• Hand-crafted. The brand reads as made by people who care, not assembled from a template.

3. The characterCopy Anchor Link

The brand carries itself like a "fullstack director": it writes the script and it pushes the camera. Creative and technically innovative, never one without the other. On time, under budget, over-delivering, always working with the best people, with a keen sense of the market and for making things people love.

Personality (working readings, from the completed system)Copy Anchor Link

Aesthetic (working readings)Copy Anchor Link

These are read from the shipped system for basement to confirm or push.

VoiceCopy Anchor Link

Measured, declarative, precise, quietly confident. Every sentence is complete and makes one claim. A caption states the mechanism: "A framed cell has a 1px padding reveal that shows the ground underneath, so the cell draws no border." Copy uses no exclamation marks, no hedging and no marketing adjectives where a fact would do. Wit is allowed when it is precise. Technical terms are used precisely and sparingly, then explained plainly. The register sits closer to a well-written spec or a good engineering blog than to marketing copy, and the copy is about the product.

• Say: "Translations are generated at build time and deploy with the app."
• Not: "Supercharge your global growth with cutting-edge AI!"

4. The markCopy Anchor Link

The GT monogram (/brand/gt-logo-light.svg, gt-logo-dark.svg + transparent PNG variants): every stroke of the mark is two parallel lines, the doubled-line grammar at brand scale. Locadex carries its own mark (/brand/locadex-mark.svg).

Rules:

• One ink. The mark renders in ink on paper or paper on ink. Never a third color, never a gradient, never a shadow.
• The dark surface inverts the drawn mark's ink, either as an alpha mask taking the surface's ink or as a clean invert. The mark is a drawing, not a picture.
• In illustration systems (the iso family), marks render as alpha masks so the shape takes the surface's ink; the sanctioned flourish is the Bayer-dithered specular shimmer (DitheredMark), never a GIF, never a filter glow.
• At text size, the wordmark sits inline with prose at the cap height of the line it lives in, as in the generaltranslation.com hero's "GT builds full-stack localization for apps, docs, and websites".
• The identity must survive compression: a favicon, a CLI banner, a README, a syntax-highlighted code block. Developers meet the brand in a terminal as often as on a website.

5. ColorCopy Anchor Link

Four absolute colors (ink #070707, raised ink #101010, titanium #8a8f98, paper #ffffff) plus exactly one spectral accent per page (the working accent: #2f5ce0; its dark-band lift #86a8ff). Structural color everywhere derives from the four as alpha steps; dark mode is a pure token remap. Full law: DESIGN.md §1. The accent is a controlled edge, never a wash; one bright white; depth from lines and material, not shadows.

6. TypeCopy Anchor Link

• Inter is the one typeface: display, interface and text. Headlines, interface chrome, captions, long-form reading and documentation prose are all set in it. The build is the real rsms.me Inter (v4.1 variable, roman + italic, opsz axis), self-hosted rather than loaded from Google Fonts.
• Headings use weight 500 at most. Display text never goes bolder than 500; long-form text is set at weight 400.
• Multilingual-first. Headlines, UI, and marks must hold up in CJK, RTL, and Indic scripts as well as Latin. A wordmark or layout that only works in English contradicts the company. Inter covers Latin, Greek and Cyrillic; other scripts fall back to the system face for that script, and every layout is checked in them. Licensed type needs credible CJK and RTL coverage, or well-matched companion faces.
• Inter is the working typeface for the identity project. It is not a final decision. Alternatives remain open if they satisfy the script-coverage constraint.
• Monospace is an instrument voice, not a brand voice. It appears where code artifacts appear (tokens, terminals, file paths, small labels in technical diagrams and product UI) and nowhere else, and even those labels are avoided where possible. The direction explicitly avoids monospace as the brand voice in headlines, body, and marketing.
• The prototemplate chrome (this site's own serif/grotesk pairing) is the lab's stationery, not the product brand.

7. Language as materialCopy Anchor Link

The signature device: glyphs, characters that make up greater wholes. Writing systems are the raw material the brand keeps returning to:

• The sentence reassembler (EverySentence): a headline dissolves into glyph dust and reassembles in the next language. Matter is conserved; the same swarm becomes the next sentence.
• The glyph field: rain from eight writing systems condensing into the word "language," script after script.
• Locale pills (LocaleTag): flag print + code, the one way a locale is named anywhere. The prints are SVG, never emoji; a flag is a functional data chip, never decoration.
• The 1-bit Bayer language: density as ordered dither, never alpha veils. This is the texture of the brand.
• The doubled line: every connector one path stroked twice; the mark's own grammar running through every diagram.

All of them run live in the build log on /docs/handbook/libraries, with their APIs.

8. Where it shipsCopy Anchor Link

The identity is applied on four kinds of surface today.

• The site. Marketing pages ship on generaltranslation.com, built in gt-cloud's apps/landing. The production landing page (gt-cloud #4213) has been canonical for the site since 2026-08-11.
• Product surfaces. The dashboard, onboarding, the sign-in plate and the Prototemplate shell have followed the brand deck (/deck) since 2026-09-25.
• Motion. The films on /motion apply the identity to film: the blog trailers, the product films and the translation-history series.
• The marks. The speed marks chosen on 2026-09-29 (/marks) sit beside the doubled-line monogram, which stays the current mark (section 4). The title badges in the /brand and /marks heads cycle through a selection of the marks on /marks.

When in doubt about how the brand behaves, read the shipped surface the work belongs to.

The site grew from the direction of the Dossier (/d/singularity-dossier). It stays in the gallery with the other directions as the working record of how we got there. From 2026-08-06 to 2026-10-07 this section named it the completed reference for the brand.

9. Context for partnersCopy Anchor Link

• Industry: AI developer tools; the full stack for localization, meaning i18n libraries, context-aware translation APIs, and the infrastructure for versioning, editing, and integrations.
• Audience: technical and product executives at growth-stage startups; their engineering and growth teams are the users.
• Public names: a customer or partner is named only where generaltranslation.com shows it. On 2026-10-10 the home page showed Cursor, Ramp, Mintlify, Profound, Partiful and ClickHouse, and a quote from Theo, CEO of T3 Chat. /enterprise showed Ramp with 11+ locales across its dashboard, landing page and iOS, Cursor with 14+ across web and docs, Profound with 47+ across platform and docs, Partiful with 2+ across web, iOS and Android, and Sierra with 7+ across web and GTM, with a quote from Lee Robinson, VP of Developer Experience at Cursor. /enterprise/contact had partner pages for YC, Mercury, Slash, speedrun, a16z and The Residency. Every other name stays off public surfaces, this repository included. Read the live site again before a new surface names anyone.
• Against: legacy TMS (seat-based, partial-stack). GT is usage-based and owns the whole stack, so it can own the whole experience.
• Admired: Vercel, Resend, Stripe, for reliable, developer-first infrastructure with engineering excellence and customer experience.
• Direction: International Style discipline with Art Deco's future-embracing stance. Swiss grids, blueprints, boxes, no rounded corners. Water and ocean as the recurring theme, connecting the globe. Bespoke material textures (reference: materialarchiv.ch).
• References: Josef Müller-Brockmann and the Swiss poster tradition; Otl Aicher's Munich 1972 pictograms; Vignelli's subway map; split-flap departure boards; undersea cable maps and nautical charts; the Rosetta Stone; the Chrysler Building; Powers of Ten; vintage National Geographic; Borges' Library of Babel; the Whole Earth Catalog; transit signage; NYRB Classics; Dieter Rams; vintage Olympics stamps.
• Avoid (final):
  • monospace as the brand voice in headlines, body, or marketing; small mono labels inside technical diagrams and product UI remain instruments, avoided where possible.
  • smooth scrolling, scroll-hijacking, and inertia libraries; native scroll everywhere.
  • robot and sparkle iconography for AI.
  • the flag-soup cliche; flags are functional data chips only, printed as SVG, never emoji.
  • iridescent AI gradients and glassmorphism.
  • eyebrow text that has not earned its place; three stacked lines saying the same thing is noise, functional tags and labels are fine.
  • em dashes in rendered prose.