Brand and the correct Inter

General Translation (GT) builds open-source i18n libraries (gt and the framework packages such as gt-next) and a closed translation platform with an AI agent, Locadex. Its identity is written in Prototemplate's BRAND.md and DESIGN.md and drawn in the brand deck (deck/parts/head.html and deck/slides/). This skill states those documents as rules for anything that carries the GT brand. Type gets the most room, because the one face is the real rsms InterVariable and nearly every type defect Kevin has flagged came from settings layered on that face.

Paths are relative to a Prototemplate checkout ($PROTOTEMPLATE) unless they name $GT_CLOUD, a gt-cloud checkout at origin/main. A long-lived gt-cloud checkout can sit on an old branch without the files named here, so read gt-cloud facts from origin/main or a fresh worktree. motion/ in Prototemplate is the films session's local folder and stays untracked, so its files exist only in Kevin's checkout (gt-films).

These files hold the detail:

• references/type.md: the font file and how to verify it, the bindings on every surface, the tokens, optical size, features, the full tracking table, the ladders, per-script stacks, the type lint and the gotchas.
• references/marks.md: the current mark and its files, the review standard for a new mark, the GT word inline in text, the speed set and how to regenerate it, the Locadex mark, the dithered shimmer and third-party logos.
• references/color.md, references/language.md and references/third-party.md: the color exceptions, the language devices and the rules for material GT did not make.
• references/sources.md: where every rule comes from, with dates.

1. The name and the naming system

The name General Translation was chosen for three reasons, in this order. The first is ambition: like General Motors or General Electric, the name states the intent to be the leading company in the category. The second is generality: general AI models understand context and follow direction better than specialised translation models. The third is distinction: most other localization companies have names that begin with L.

• A product token keeps its exact form and is never the first word of a heading. A heading names the thing: "Prototemplate" in the heading, "prototemplate.com" in the body.
• The identity project with basement studio has two fixed points: the legal name General Translation and the names customers install and import (gt and the packages). The mark, the colors, the type, the layout system, the voice, the site structure and the product names, Locadex included, are open in that project (deck slide 93). The rules in this skill are the working system until the project hands off its replacement.

2. The idea and the values

The thesis is "every product in every language": native-level speed and quality from the first day. The positioning is the Vercel model applied to localization. GT builds the open-source libraries (gt and the framework packages) and the closed platform (context-aware translation APIs, versioning, editing, integrations and Locadex) as one stack. Because GT owns the whole stack, it can deliver consistent translation quality across a company's apps, docs and websites, integrated in an afternoon. The open source carries a community register and the platform an enterprise register, in one family.

The identity has to carry five values:

• Engineering-first. Built by people with deep technical roots for the best engineering teams.
• Craft. The difference between a line drawn once and a line drawn twice matters, and the line law in DESIGN.md section 2 makes it literal.
• Infrastructure-grade. Reliable, fast and secure; something an enterprise stands on.
• Cosmopolitan. Urbane and sophisticated, connecting the world's languages. Language is the material as well as the market.
• Hand-crafted. Made by people who care, with no template look.

The voice is measured, declarative and precise. BRAND.md section 3 gives the pair:

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

Deck slide 12 states the five rules: one claim per sentence; a number or a mechanism where a marketing adjective would go; no hedging; no exclamation marks and no em dashes; sentence case everywhere and Title Case only on buttons. The full writing rules are in gt-voice.

For product surfaces, Kevin judges the result against the brand deck (2026-09-25); for the site, the reference is the shipped generaltranslation.com, built from apps/landing in gt-cloud. The Dossier (/d/singularity-dossier) stays in the gallery as the direction the site grew from (Kevin, 2026-10-07: "fix the dossier references"). gt-aesthetic section 1 and its references/verdicts.md hold the history.

3. Color

Four absolute colors and one accent. The four are declared once in src/app/globals.css (--color-ink and the rest) and mirrored by the shell (src/components/viewer/tokens.css) and the deck (deck/parts/head.html). The accent is declared per page root (for example --tc-accent in a direction's styles.css, --sl-accent and --aw-accent on the gallery), and the deck shows it only as a labelled swatch (deck/DECK-GRAMMAR.md).

• Structure derives from the four by alpha. The deck and the shell add one secondary text color, ink-2 #3a3d44, and draw the rest as alphas of ink: hairlines at 18% and 9%, a plate at 3.5%, and a frame line at 62% for pictures only. Pages read these semantic tokens and never the raw values.
• Dark mode is a token remap and nothing else. Under [data-theme='dark'] paper becomes #070707, ink becomes #f2f2f0, ink-2 becomes #b9bcc3, and the hairline alphas rise to 22% and 10% so a 1px seam survives between two ink surfaces.
• The accent marks small elements: an active state, a diagram highlight, one pulse on a thread. It never fills a large area and never colors a heading (emphasis is a doubled underline in the text color). An isometric drawing spends it on exactly one element (DESIGN.md section 6), and a film on one thing at a time.
• The accent per ground. On ink the accent is always the lift #86a8ff: #2f5ce0 sits at 3.58:1 on #070707. New work takes these two values. Deck slide 26 records two other blues in use (#3b82f6 in the docs, #2563eb on the blog) as drift to resolve.
• Depth comes from lines and material. No shadows anywhere.
• Semantic hues appear on icons only, in the deck: #12a37a done or passing, #f0a020 open or in review, #e5484d excluded or rejected, #2f5ce0 GT itself. The four are the same in both of the deck's themes, so these icon hues are separate from the accent's lift. Text and lines stay monochrome. The shell's site icons use the same amber on ink and darken it to #c47d00 on paper, where #f0a020 sits at 2.15:1 (--pt-site-signal).
• Contrast. Titanium on paper is 3.25:1, under the 4.5:1 that small text needs; on ink it is 6.2:1. gt-cloud's plate pages darken light-theme titanium to #6e737c (4.77:1) in $GT_CLOUD/apps/dashboard/src/app/brand-tokens.css. Check titanium text at 13px in the light theme before shipping it.

The color rules have four documented exceptions, each named in references/color.md so no sweep removes it: the films (a film's palette is its material), the dashboard's credits card, the horizon ring (deck slide 39) and the Prototemplate mark's rainbow core.

4. Type

Inter is the one typeface for display, interface and text. The build is the rsms.me Inter 4.1 variable family, roman and italic, self-hosted. Detail and measurements are in references/type.md.

The face.

• The files are public/fonts/InterVariable.woff2 (sha1 f55b18fd) and public/fonts/InterVariable-Italic.woff2 (sha1 a5f0513e). Their family name is "Inter Variable", version string 4.001, with axes opsz 14 to 32 and wght 100 to 900.
• The deck (which inlines the roman) and gt-cloud's landing serve the same bytes. Prototemplate serves unicode-range subsets cut from them in public/fonts/inter, which keep every feature and both axes.
• No other Inter is ever loaded: no Google Fonts build through next/font/google, no fontsource package, no CDN copy, no local() source.
• No stack names 'Inter', 'InterVariable' or 'Inter Display' as a family. A bare name matches whatever Inter the reader has installed. The deck is the one place a family is named 'Inter': its @font-face carries the roman as a data URI, which cannot fail to load, so it always hides an installed Inter (references/type.md).

The binding. Prototemplate binds the roman's latin subset as ptInter (src/lib/fonts.ts, --font-inter) with the other subsets and the italic as @font-face rules in the same family (src/app/inter-subsets.css). A next/font binding named inter shares its name with an installed Inter, which then renders if the woff2 fails; gt-cloud's landing still carries that exposure. Detail: references/type.md.

The stack is var(--font-inter), system-ui, sans-serif (the shell's --pt-text); 'Helvetica Neue', Arial after the variable add nothing.

Weights. 400 for running text and long-form reading. 500 for labels, headings, display text, b and strong. Nothing above 500 and nothing below 400. The browser's bolder turns b and strong into 700, so a base rule sets them to 500.

Optical size. font-optical-sizing: auto and never font-variation-settings. The browser sets opsz to the font size in px, clamped to 14 to 32. Text at 14px and under gets the Text design, text from 32px gets the Display design, and sizes between them get the intermediate instances. Pinning opsz or wght through font-variation-settings breaks that mapping.

Features. Two lists, applied only through tokens:

• display: 'liga' 1, 'calt' 1, 'cv11' 1, 'ss01' 1 for h1, h2 and display sentences (the deck's .big). cv11 is the single-storey a and ss01 the open digits.
• text: 'liga' 1, 'calt' 1 for everything else, labels and numerals included.
• Chrome switches calt off under any letter-spacing, which loses Inter's arrows and its colon and hyphen fitting. Naming 'liga' 1, 'calt' 1 restores them. rsms.me's own CSS carries the same fix.
• font-feature-settings replaces the inherited list, so one stray rule changes the letterforms of a whole subtree. Tabular figures come from font-variant-numeric: tabular-nums and never from 'tnum' in the feature list.

Tracking. Tracking tightens with size and weight, and weight 400 text is never tracked: -0.025em for titles 32px and up at weight 500, -0.02em for figures and 24px heads, -0.015em for display quotes, -0.01em for labels, -0.005em for group labels, and 0 for running text. Positive tracking appears only on gt-cloud's 13px captions (+0.01em) and the deck's 13px counters (+0.02em); the Prototemplate shell tracks nothing positive, and nothing goes tighter than -0.025em. The table with where each value is set: references/type.md.

Measure and wrapping. Body text runs 60 to 70 characters a line: --pt-measure: 32em for body and --pt-measure-lead: 30em for leads. Set new measures in em and never in ch: Inter's zero is about 0.63em wide, so 62ch comes to 83 to 86 characters. The deck's ch measures (.max, .max-p, the book head) belong to the deck's owner. Headings h1 to h3 take text-wrap: balance.

The ladders. The shell ladder (d1 44 to meta 13), the deck sheet ladder (h1 88 to caption 15, nothing under 15px on the sheet) and the landing's phone ladder (DESIGN.md section 12) are in references/type.md.

Monospace is an instrument voice. It sets code, tokens, terminals, file paths, hex values and locale codes, and nothing else: no headline, body or marketing line is ever set in mono. Prototemplate uses --pt-mono and gt-cloud uses Geist Mono (--font-mono).

Scripts. Inter covers Latin, Greek and Cyrillic; CJK, Arabic, Hebrew and Indic text falls back to a script face, and every layout is checked in CJK, RTL and Indic text as well as Latin. A real Arabic or Hebrew face takes its own rule with no Inter variable in front (references/type.md).

Exceptions. The nameplate's Fraunces and Space Grotesk, the gallery's grotesk labels on /, the /d/ directions, the presenter's faces, the weight specimens (deck slide 27, .ptb-display) and the speed marks' outline faces. Each is named in references/type.md so no sweep removes it.

Enforcement. Prototemplate's scripts/lint/type.mjs (static in pnpm build, pnpm lint:type:live, pnpm test:type; exceptions as /* lint-type: allow <reason> */) and gt-cloud's gt-ui rules inter-only, mono-is-not-voice, no-thin-font and typed-text-var, of which pnpm lint:code runs a copy. What each fails: references/type.md; the wiring: gt-lints.

5. Marks

Detail, files and procedures are in references/marks.md.

• The current mark is the doubled-line GT monogram: every stroke of the G and the T is two parallel lines, the doubled-line grammar at brand scale. Its vector outline is REFERENCE_MARK in src/lib/marks.ts, the same path as the deck's #gt-mark symbol. The masters are public/brand/no-bg-gt-logo-light.png and no-bg-gt-logo-dark.png (the white mark). The gt-logo-*.svg files beside them draw the same outline in black and in white.
• One ink. Ink on paper or paper on ink. No third color, no gradient, no shadow, no glow. On a dark surface the drawn mark inverts, as an alpha mask that takes the surface's ink or as a clean invert. A mark ships only as vector geometry.
• Compression. The mark must hold at 16px (favicon), 32px (CLI banner), 64px (README header), 128px (npm page) and 256px (website), because developers meet the brand in a terminal as often as on the site (deck slide 25).
• Inline. At text size the GT mark sits in the line at the cap height of the text around it, with the letters GT kept as hidden text.
• A new mark. The G's top arc runs out into a straight horizontal segment, as in the current monogram; a diagonal, radial or hooked terminal is refused (Kevin, 2026-10-09). The review standard and the failure list for new marks are in references/marks.md ("Reviewing a new GT mark").
• Locadex has its own one-color mark (public/brand/locadex-mark.svg; LocadexMark in gt-cloud's packages/ui) and appears only where it has a function.
• The speed set. Kevin chose seven race-type marks on 2026-09-29 (bar monogram, lockup, plate, double cut, livery stack, dithered, ASCII). They are presented beside the current mark on /marks and on deck slides 17 to 23. scripts/build/speed-marks.mjs generates every file from geometry and font outlines (pnpm build:marks). Regenerate them; never redraw one by hand or edit an SVG under public/marks.
• The one flourish is the dithered specular shimmer (DitheredMark, the 4 by 4 Bayer band swept through the mark's alpha mask). A mark is never a gif and never carries a filter glow; gt-ui no-gif-mark refuses gifs.
• Third-party logos come from thesvg.org files, inlined as components. The @thesvg/react package (84 MB unpacked) is never added. In gt-cloud they live in packages/ui/src/components/icons/*Logo.tsx on the shared BrandMark root.

6. Language as material

The brand's recurring subject is writing systems. Its five devices are glyphs (the glyph field), the sentence reassembler (EverySentence.tsx, DESIGN.md section 8), locale pills (a flag as an SVG chip beside its code, never decoration or an emoji), the 1-bit Bayer language (ordered dither, never an alpha veil; gt-dither) and the doubled line (gt-diagrams). Each device's owner file and rules are in references/language.md.

7. The avoid list

The basement brand questionnaire was finalised on 2026-08-11. Its avoid list, BRAND.md section 9 and deck slide 39 together:

The direction behind the list is International Style discipline with Art Deco's forward stance: Swiss grids, blueprints, boxes, square corners, water and the ocean as the recurring theme, and bespoke material textures. The references are in BRAND.md section 9.

8. Public surfaces

prototemplate.com, the deck, the public Prototemplate repository, generaltranslation.com, the docs, the blog, the films and every social post are public.

• None of them states anything about funding (investors, rounds or amounts), revenue or its mix, headcount, or the timing of an unannounced launch. The brand book on /brand leaves the questionnaire's sensitive facts out by design (Kevin, 2026-08-06), and every new surface keeps them out.
• The Prototemplate repository is public, so no key, token, email address or personal detail goes into a page, a picture, a capture, a skill or a commit.

Third-party material

Any logo, picture, font, model or shader GT did not make follows references/third-party.md: the source order (house components, then the owner's brand page, then thesvg.org, CC0 or licensed scans, and real recordings; keep searching and never redraw an approximation by hand), provenance and credit recorded as each asset lands, licences kept or the material removed (a public repository stays public and loses the material, Kevin, 2026-10-02), and customer marks limited to those BRAND.md section 9 and production already show. Prototemplate reserves all rights to General Translation (LICENSE).

Review checklist

Run it on any surface that carries the brand, in both themes, at 1440 and at 390 wide.

• [ ] Every Latin run renders from the self-hosted InterVariable file: Chrome DevTools lists it under Rendered Fonts as a network resource, never as a local file (references/type.md has the CDP check). In Prototemplate, pnpm lint:type and pnpm lint:type:live pass.
• [ ] No stack names a bare Inter, and the Inter variable comes first in every stack.
• [ ] Headings are weight 500, with the display features, balanced wrap and the tracking for their size. Running text is 400 and untracked. b and strong compute 500.
• [ ] No font-variation-settings, and no feature list written outside the two tokens.
• [ ] Mono appears only on code, tokens, paths, hex values and locale codes.
• [ ] Lines run 60 to 70 characters, and a lead reads in two or three lines.
• [ ] Four colors and one accent, with the lift #86a8ff on ink. Small titanium text in the light theme clears 4.5:1, darkened the way gt-cloud's plate pages darken it.
• [ ] Marks are one ink, from the files or the generator, at a size their minimum allows, with no glow, gradient, shadow or gif.
• [ ] Flags are SVG chips next to locale codes.
• [ ] The copy has no em dashes, exclamation marks, eyebrows or heading periods, and follows gt-voice.
• [ ] Non-Latin samples (CJK, Arabic, Devanagari) render in a face for their script and keep the layout.
• [ ] Nothing about funding, revenue, headcount or launch timing appears.
• [ ] Every third-party asset came from its owner or the named source, its source and terms are recorded, borrowed work is credited on the page, no approximation was drawn by hand, and every licence is kept or the material removed (references/third-party.md).

Related skills

General skills in Kevin's wiki that this one depends on: design-engineering-polish, create-graphics. GT skills in this set: gt-voice (copy), gt-aesthetic (taste and polish), gt-deck (the brand deck), gt-lints (the line law, the picture standard, the type lint, gt-ui), gt-dither, gt-diagrams (with the isometric family), gt-explorations (mark rounds), gt-verify (the browser checks), gt-motion, gt-films, gt-graphics, gt-components, gt-website and gt-landing-pages.

Sources

Dated provenance for every rule is in references/sources.md: BRAND.md, DESIGN.md and the deck, the font files and lints, the gt-cloud files, and Kevin's dated directives with the memory notes that recorded them.