the idea
hello paint turns a customer's photo into a custom paint-by-number kit they print and paint at home. The personality is a cozy cool girl: warm, cheery, friendly to all ages, and unmistakably made by a person. The look is flat and hand-painted, never techy or arcade. The palette leads with warm cream and a raspberry "hello," with teal and sunshine doing the eye-catching, and it stays clear of orange on purpose, so the brand reads as human-made.
The wedge is being both instant and human: free photo-to-template sites deliver in seconds but nobody checks the photo, and $40 to $60 mailed kits are checked and cared for but take a week to arrive. hello paint is the only option in the category that is both, so every asset should make that trade visible, not just claim it.
logo family
Half photo, half numbered kit. The mark that explains the product on its own.
A hello bubble full of paint. Your round photo on every platform.
A painted smile with a sunshine wink. The friendly sign-off.
the smile
Every attempt at a literal hand felt busy or stiff: too many fingers, too much to read at sticker size. So the third mark became what the brand was reaching for all along: a warm, open smile. One raspberry curve, a teal streak of motion, and a sunshine wink: it reads in an instant, paints in a single color, and feels exactly like a friendly hello.
main mark · reading order
The sun now sits on the right in both halves, so the painted photo and the numbered template line up, and the labels run in natural order: sky 1 on the left, the sun 2 beside it, and the hill 3 below. Same scene, same paint dabs on the border; it just reads top-to-bottom, left-to-right like a real kit.
lockups & reversed
Pink and white or all white, nothing else, ever (owner rule, restated 2026-08-07). On light grounds: hello in berry (the deeper text-safe berry on tinted light grounds) and paint in plum ink. On plum ink: hello stays berry, paint flips to cream. On berry, green, or teal grounds the whole mark goes white (owner ruling, 2026-08-08: berry cannot sit on green or teal). Sunshine is a brand color for shapes and accents and is never a wordmark color. A ground this list does not name is a question for Megan, not a gap to fill.
clear space & minimum size
Keep clear space around the mark equal to the height of the lowercase h in the wordmark, on every side. Never crowd it with text or edges.
Every mark is flat vector, renders in one ink, and stays legible at favicon size.
Full lockup: at least 120 px wide on screen, 25 mm in print.
color
#E64C81#15A39A#F6C744#5BA86B#BFE6F2#312B3D#FBF4E8#FFFDF8#FBD0DDA lighter tint and a darker shade for backgrounds and states. The deep variants double as the legible text colors.
Lead with the neutrals so the brights stay loud. Roughly:
Body text is plum ink on cream, or cream on ink. For berry or teal text on light, use the deep variants. Bright raspberry and teal are for headlines, shapes, and the logo, not paragraphs.
| Text on background | Ratio | Use |
|---|---|---|
| Plum ink on cream | 12.44 | Body ✓ |
| Cream on plum ink | 12.44 | Reversed body ✓ |
| Sky on plum ink | 10.25 | On dark ✓ |
| Deep teal on cream | 5.07 | Links, teal text ✓ |
| Deep berry on cream | 5.01 | Berry text ✓ |
| Raspberry on cream | 3.36 | Large / headline only |
typography
Optical serif, weight 600 (and 500 italic for taglines). Warm and editorial. One headline per view; never set long body copy in it.
Friendly sans. 400 / 700 for text, 800 for the wordmark and kit numbers. Lowercase wordmark, one space, always.
applications
voice & tone
Talk the way you'd hype a friend. Lead with the before and after. Ask for the photo they love. Keep the handle lowercase. Show the transformation, not the process.
legibility
Added 2026-08-07, after 130 of 224 shipped listing photos measured a typical
line under the readable bar and Megan reported she could not read them at a normal
distance from her screen. These are the numbers that decide it, and
~/Projects/publish-check measures them off the pixels.
A surface shows an image at a fixed width, and that width decides everything. What gets measured is ink: the height of a line of lowercase type from the top of an ascender to the bottom of a descender. Measured in Nunito Sans on 2026-08-07, ink is about 0.92 of the font size for a line carrying both. So the type floor is always higher than the ink floor, and confusing the two is how the first draft of this shipped at 41px and still missed.
Small print is only ever a choice on a surface that zooms. On anything scrolled past it is a mistake. And a warning that fires on most of a fleet is a failure, not noise: publish-check reported "0 failing" while more than half the boards were unreadable at a glance, because an etsy gallery image technically zooms.
text-wrap: balance on headings,
captions and short blocks, pretty on body copy, and an explicit
where a phrase must hold together. A break in the
wrong place makes a confident sentence look accidental.retired_wording.json and is checked against every surface
that ships. Remembering is not a mechanism.max-height rules quietly clipped
their own cards as the copy grew inside them.do & don't
hello paint brand guide · marks are original vector art · type is Fraunces & Nunito Sans (free Google Fonts) · the palette avoids orange on purpose, so the brand reads as human-made.