Voice, palette, typography, and iconography all live in one place. The brand catalogue (`docs/Nudgey_Brand_Catalogue_v1.docx`) is the source of truth; this page is the working reference.
Nudgey speaks like someone who's been around your money for a while and knows the shape of your week. Direct, warm, never schoolmarmish. Never alarmist.
Observation, not evaluation. "Food is up this week" — not "you spent too much on food." Show the pattern, name the choice, leave the judgement.
Warnings are gentle. Pre-spend pauses, over-budget cards, the pause icon — all coral, all tonally calm. No alarm reds. No emoji, no exclamations.
If a card is trying to say two things, it's two cards. The Reveal shows one pattern at a time. The Sunday Drop is one insight. The pre-spend pause is one number.
M-Pesa, sacco, Tala, Equitel — the words used in life. Don't translate them into Western finance terms ("e-wallet," "credit facility"). And don't lean on Sheng for warmth — that's performance, not voice.
The dot in nudgey. is the only place terracotta is decorative. Everywhere else terracotta means "agent voice" — the wordmark, the agent presence dot, message receipts. Sacred role.
Inter Regular and Inter Bold. No medium, no semibold, no italics. The whole brand is a single typographic system that reads as confident.
Nudgey is framed as behavioral learning, not message-reading: "Nudgey learns how your money moves from your phone, on-device — nothing leaves it." The OS permission dialog is unavoidable, but our copy never says "SMS reader," "reads your texts," or "scans your messages." Peer, not parent.
Roles do not overlap. Terracotta is the wordmark and agent voice; gold marks wins; coral pauses; ink structures; cream warms; paper elevates.
Terracotta is sacred. It marks the wordmark period, the agent's voice, message receipts, and the four bespoke icons that need it (period, drop, money map, period story). Never decoration. Never accent. Never on Phosphor icons.
Inter is the digital primary face — chosen for legibility at small sizes (critical for dense transaction data), wide weight range, and global language support including Swahili diacritics. Two weights: Regular (400) and Bold (700). No medium. No italic.
Mobile (Flutter) uses the catalogue numbers verbatim — display 32 / h1 22 / h2 16 / body 11 / small 9 / eyebrow 8. Web ladders up modestly via the fontSizes table in packages/brand/src/typography.ts.
Phosphor Regular is the base set. We freeze 30 — adding one is a spec amendment, not a per-screen import. Mobile (Flutter) and backoffice (Next.js) consume the same set via packages/brand. Marketing carries the brand through Inter, photography, and the wordmark — never icons.
The most emotionally loaded surfaces get glyphs that exist only in Nudgey. Each is bichrome by construction — the accent color is locked, never overridden.
The dot from nudgey. Reusable as agent presence, message receipt, the Reveal opener.
Sunday-Drop motif. Drop silhouette, ink stroke, terracotta inner-drop fill. Only on Drop surfaces.
Three radial nodes around a terracotta center. The glyph for the Money Map — the living, provider→provider picture of where money moves.
Six-pointed editorial bloom in gold with ink outline. Streaks, wins, premium signal. Replaces the generic star.
Two-bar pause inside an open ring with coral-soft fill. Replaces any "warning triangle." Coral, never red.
Document silhouette with a folded corner revealing terracotta. The "turn the page" metaphor. Premium-only surface.
Phosphor icons stay neutral; bespokes carry the accent. Four sizes only — used by name, never by raw px.
Generous white space. One headline. One number. Cards feel like printed pages, not dashboards. The Sunday Drop is a poster, not a notification panel.
Same dot, same voice, same shape. The user can predict where Nudgey will speak. Predictability is half of trust.
Agentic Levels 0–3 only (deterministic screens, dynamic content, dynamic ordering, dynamic journeys, generative copy in fixed slots). Levels 4–5 are explicitly forbidden — no generative components, no generative UI markup. Brand consistency, accessibility, predictability are protected values.
The daily cards never bury two decisions on a single surface. If the user has two calls to make, that's two cards.
The pre-spend pause card is the live agentic moment. Coral, never red. Five seconds of breathing room. Never auto-cancels — Nudgey doesn't take the action; the bank does. The pause hands the choice back to the user.
The 2026-06-15 redesign exploration for the Money Map: editorial, all-cream, money as the hero, the conversation layered on top — colours locked to the palette above. It carries these principles into the live screens (home, accounts grouped by institution, where-your-money-went, counterparty detail, statement) and folds in the fixes found on-device — friendly account labels, institution grouping, search, month→day dates, reconciled totals, the broken swipe removed.
Full-screen gallery of Direction A across every Money Map surface. Design spec: docs/superpowers/specs/2026-06-15-money-map-ui-redesign-design.md.
Photography is for the marketing surface (`thenudgey.com`) and the executive brief. Mobile and backoffice don't use photography — they use type, the wordmark, and the icon system.
Final art direction lives in the Brand Catalogue (`docs/Nudgey_Brand_Catalogue_v1.docx`). This page reproduces the rules; it does not replace the catalogue.