One identity, applied with engineering discipline.

These guidelines govern every external expression of Quantum Robo: proposals, tenders, whitepapers, the website, product interfaces, presentations, signage and stationery.

They exist because our brand carries a specific burden. We ask research institutions and government bodies to trust us with work where being wrong has consequences. An identity applied carelessly — a stretched logo, an unreadable colour pairing, a document set in the wrong typeface — undermines that argument before a word of it is read. Consistency here is not decoration; it is part of the competence claim.

The rules are written to be followed without a designer present. Where a rule is absolute it says must. Where judgement is permitted it says should. If a situation is not covered, the governing principle is in section 02 — apply that, then tell us so the next version covers it.

Everything in this document derives from one tension, which the identity is designed to hold: we must look like we are ahead of the field, and we must look like we can be trusted with a public contract. Those pull in opposite directions. Brands that chase the first alone look like a start-up that will not exist in three years. Brands that chase the second alone look like a systems integrator from 2009.

The resolution is precision. Not ornament, not futurism, not gradients and glow — engineered exactness. A hexagon built on real geometry. A palette of four colours held with discipline. Typography that is wide and technical in the mark, and quietly readable everywhere else. The impression we want is of a company that measures things.

Positioning

Quantum Robo is a software and robotics engineering company that builds production AI systems and robotics for organisations entering the field, and for those already in it who need to go further than their current capability allows.

Brand values

• Precision. We measure rather than assert. This is why the identity is geometric and the guidelines are specific.
• Candour. We tell clients what will not work, including when it costs us the sale. The brand voice never oversells because the company does not.
• Range. Fieldbus to foundation models, seven sectors. The identity has to sit as comfortably on a clinical research paper as on a robotics product.
• Durability. We build systems that survive audit. The identity should look correct in ten years, which is why it avoids anything currently fashionable.

Personality

Our written voice is the largest surface of the brand — most people meet Quantum Robo through a proposal or a whitepaper long before they see a logo. It is governed by one instruction: write as though the reader is an intelligent engineer who is short of time and has been sold artificial intelligence before.

Principles

• State, do not sell. Say what the system does and what it does not. Superlatives are read as evasion by exactly the audience we want.
• Quantify where you can. "Sub-800 ms median voice-to-voice latency" earns trust. "Lightning fast" spends it.
• Mark your uncertainty. Forecasts are labelled as forecasts. Unverified claims are flagged. This is a brand asset, not a weakness.
• British English, formal register. "Organisation", "programme", "analyse". Long-form documents use serial structure and full sentences; we do not write in fragments.
• Avoid the vocabulary of the hype cycle. No revolutionary, game-changing, disruptive, seamless, unlock, supercharge, next-generation. If a sentence survives their removal, it did not need them.
• Never anthropomorphise the system. It does not think, understand or know. It retrieves, infers, drafts, proposes.

Register by audience

Naming

The company is Quantum Robo — two words, both capitalised, no hyphen, no camel case, never "QuantumRobo" or "Quantum ROBO" in running text. There is no approved abbreviation; do not write "QR" in prose. Document codes may use the QR- prefix.

The identity is a stacked lockup: a geometric Q monogram above the wordmark QUANTUM ROBO. The monogram is a hexagonal ring whose lower-right edge is interrupted by a diagonal bar, forming the tail of a Q. The hexagon reads as engineering, modularity and structure; the interruption is what stops it being a generic tech hexagon.

Construction

The mark is built from real geometry, not drawn by eye. Any reproduction must follow it.

The monogram alone

The Q mark may be used without the wordmark where the name is already established or where space is severely constrained: favicons and app icons, social avatars, document headers and page furniture, product interface chrome, and physical marking on hardware. It must not replace the full lockup on a document cover, a stand, a proposal or any first point of contact.

Four master variants exist. The choice is determined by the background, not by preference.

Single-colour and reversed use

Where colour is unavailable — single-colour print, embroidery, engraving, laser marking, fax-grade reproduction — the entire lockup is rendered in one colour: Charcoal on light grounds, or White on dark and on Quantum Red. A single-colour Quantum Red lockup is permitted on white and Technical Silver only.

The logo needs room. Crowding it is the single most common way the identity is degraded in practice, usually by placing it too close to a page edge or a partner logo.

Minimum sizes

Below these sizes the knockout gap between the tail and the ring closes up and the mark reads as a solid blob. The specimens below are rendered at their true size on screen.

Placement

• Default position is top left on documents and interfaces, and optically centred on covers, stands and signage.
• The logo aligns to the layout grid, not to the optical edge of the hexagon. Align to the mark's bounding box.
• Only one Quantum Robo logo per view. A logo in the header and another in the footer of the same screen is a duplication, not reinforcement.
• The logo is never a link target in body copy, never inline in a sentence, and never used as a bullet or decorative element.

Each of the following is prohibited. They are shown because describing them is less effective than seeing them.

Four colours. The restraint is the point — a narrow palette held consistently reads as deliberate, and a wide one reads as improvised. Click any value to copy it.

Extended digital palette

Interfaces need more than four values. These are derived from the core palette and are permitted in digital application only — they are not brand colours and must not appear in print or identity work.

Proportion

Quantum Red should occupy no more than roughly ten per cent of any composition. The identity is predominantly ground and neutral — white or Charcoal carrying Montserrat — with red doing a small amount of very deliberate work. A page washed in red reads as an alarm, not as authority.

Do not introduce additional accent colours. If a chart or diagram needs to distinguish more than two series, use tints of Charcoal and Technical Silver with Quantum Red reserved for the single series that matters, rather than reaching for blue or green.

Public sector bodies in the United Kingdom are bound by the Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) Accessibility Regulations 2018, which require WCAG 2.2 Level AA. Our own materials must meet the standard we ask clients to meet. All ratios below are measured, not estimated.

Further requirements

• Never encode meaning in colour alone. Charts, status indicators and diagrams must also carry a label, shape or pattern — roughly one in twelve men has a colour vision deficiency, and red against dark grey is a common confusion.
• Interface text must meet 4.5:1 at normal size and 3:1 at 18.66 px bold or 24 px regular and above.
• Non-text elements — input borders, focus rings, icons carrying meaning — must meet 3:1 against their surroundings.
• Focus states must be visible and must not rely on colour change alone; use a 2 px outline with an offset.
• Logos are exempt from contrast requirements under WCAG. We apply them anyway, which is why section 05 restricts the permitted logo-on-background pairings.

Two typefaces, with a strict division of labour. Eurostile Extended is the logo, and only the logo. Montserrat is everything else.

This split is deliberate. Eurostile Extended is what gives the name its aerospace and robotics character — wide, engineered, geometric. It is also, set at length, genuinely hard to read. Using it for headings and body copy would produce documents that look like a 1970s technical manual and perform like one. Montserrat keeps the geometric register while remaining comfortable across a forty-page tender.

Eurostile Extended — the logo only

QUANTUM is set in Eurostile Extended Bold. ROBO is set in Eurostile Extended at a lighter weight with increased letter spacing. Both are converted to vector outlines in the master artwork.

Montserrat — everything else

Website, product interfaces, whitepapers, proposals, tenders, reports, presentations, signage and stationery. Montserrat is open source under the SIL Open Font License, so it can be installed, embedded and web-served without cost or restriction.

Weights in use

Setting rules

• Never use Montserrat 900 Black. At heading sizes it closes up and reads as shouting.
• Never letterspace body copy. Positive tracking is reserved for uppercase labels at 14 px and below, where it should be 0.14–0.20em.
• Uppercase is for labels only — eyebrows, table headers, chips, section markers. Never for headings, never for a sentence.
• Left-align. Never justify. Justified setting produces rivers in a geometric sans and measurably harms readers with dyslexia.
• Measure: 60–75 characters per line for body copy. Our documents use a 44 rem prose column for this reason.
• Leading: 1.7–1.8 for body, 1.4–1.5 for subheads, 1.04–1.2 for display.
• Negative tracking on headings only, scaling with size: −0.012em at 22 px to −0.024em at 48 px and above.
• Tabular figures in tables and data displays so columns of numbers align.

Fallback stacks

Web: 'Montserrat', -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, 'Segoe UI', Roboto, sans-serif

Where Montserrat cannot be installed — a client's locked-down Word environment, a tender portal that strips fonts — substitute Arial, which is closest in width and will not reflow a laid-out document. Do not substitute Calibri, Century Gothic or Futura.

Beyond logo, colour and type, a small set of recurring devices carries the brand. They are drawn from the same geometry as the mark, and they are what make an unbranded page still look like ours.

The engineering grid

A hairline square grid at 72 px, in the palette's faintest neutral, masked so it fades rather than terminating at an edge. Used on covers and hero areas at very low opacity. It signals measurement without decoration. It must never appear behind body copy, and never at an opacity where it becomes a visible texture.

Section numerals

Monospaced, leading-zero, in the accent colour: 01, 02, 03. Used for section heads, numbered principles and contents lists. This is a signature device — it appears in every long-form document we publish and it is the cheapest way to make a page read as ours.

Rules and edges

• Hairline rules at 1 px in the line colour, separating sections and table rows.
• A 2 px accent rule in Quantum Red for callouts and active states — always on the leading edge, never a full box.
• Corner radius is 2–3 px maximum. Never pills, never large radii; rounded corners read as consumer software and undermine the register.

Chips and tags

Uppercase monospace at 10–11 px, 0.09–0.16em tracking, 1 px border, 2 px radius, transparent or raised-surface fill. Used for technology tags, sector markers and metadata.

Hexagonal derivations

The hexagon may be used as a container, a diagram node or a sparse background tiling — but only in the flat orientation of the mark, only at low emphasis, and never so densely that it competes with the logo. If a viewer has to look twice to find the real mark, there is too much hexagon on the page.

Iconography

Geometric line icons on a 24 px grid: 1.5 px stroke, square caps and joins, no fills, no rounded terminals, no duotone. Icons inherit the surrounding text colour and must meet 3:1 contrast where they carry meaning.

Diagrams

Diagrams are a core deliverable, not an afterthought. Hairline strokes, monospace labels, Quantum Red reserved for the one element the reader should look at first, and everything else in neutrals. Architecture diagrams should show the actual mechanism — data paths, trust boundaries, the determinism line — rather than a row of pleasant boxes.

Imagery is where technical brands most often undo themselves. The default visual vocabulary of artificial intelligence is actively harmful to our positioning.

Treatment

• Slightly desaturated, neutral to cool, with retained shadow detail. Contrast is achieved through composition rather than filters.
• Charcoal duotone is permitted where an image must sit behind type or in a strip.
• Quantum Red should appear in an image only if it is genuinely present in the scene. Do not tint imagery red.
• No heavy vignettes, no lens flares, no synthetic bokeh, no AI-generated photography presented as documentary.

Logo over imagery

The logo goes on a solid holding panel or on a genuinely plain region of the image, with the 2X clear space measured from the mark and respected against image detail as strictly as against type. If neither is available, the image is the wrong image.

Attribution and rights

Client and site photography requires written permission before publication, including for the portfolio. Where a client is under NDA, the engagement is described without imagery rather than illustrated with a stock substitute.

The website and product interfaces are the brand's highest-traffic surface. They must look current without dating quickly, which means restraint rather than trend.

Light and dark

Every digital surface supports both. Dark is the default for marketing and long-form documents — it is where the identity is strongest and where the silver-on-charcoal relationship of the logo comes from. Light is the default for dense product interfaces and anything intended to be printed. The user's choice must persist, and the correct logo variant must swap with the theme.

Spacing and layout

• 4 px base spacing scale: 4, 8, 12, 16, 24, 32, 48, 64, 96.
• Prose column 44 rem; full content width 72 rem; sidebar rail 16.5 rem.
• Generous vertical rhythm between sections. Density is for tables, not for pages.

Components

Motion

• Durations 140–220 ms for interface response; 300–500 ms for entrances. Nothing slower.
• Easing cubic-bezier(.22,.61,.36,1) as standard.
• Motion clarifies a relationship or it does not happen. No parallax, no scroll-jacking, no decorative looping animation.
• prefers-reduced-motion must be honoured on every surface — this is an accessibility requirement, not a nicety.

Favicon and app icons

The mark alone on a transparent or Charcoal ground. Supply 16, 32, 180 and 512 px raster sizes plus the SVG. Never the full lockup — the wordmark is illegible at icon sizes and the result reads as a smudge.

Institutional clients read documents, frequently on paper and frequently in a room where several suppliers' submissions are on the same table. Our documents should be identifiable from across it.

Document architecture

Long-form documents follow a fixed structure: a cover carrying the full lockup, an eyebrow, the title and a metadata strip; then numbered sections with monospace leading-zero numerals; an executive summary first; and — for whitepapers and capability documents — a closing note on intellectual honesty that identifies which claims rest on forecast. That last section is a brand feature. It should not be dropped for brevity.

Page setup

Stationery

• Letterhead. Full lockup top left at 35 mm wide, clear space respected against the trim edge. Address block in Montserrat Regular 8 pt, Charcoal, at the foot. No rules across the head.
• Business card. 85 × 55 mm. Mark only on the face in Quantum Red on white, or reversed in white on Charcoal; details on the reverse. Uncoated stock, 400 gsm minimum.
• Email signature. Plain text or minimal HTML: name, role, Quantum Robo, telephone, site. Mark at 32 px maximum. No image-only signatures, no social icon rows, no marketing banners, no legal boilerplate longer than the message.
• Presentations. Charcoal ground, Technical Silver type, Quantum Red for the single point of emphasis per slide. Mark bottom right at 18 px. One idea per slide.
• Signage and vehicle livery. Match to a physical Pantone draw-down and sign off a sample before production. Screen values are not a specification for a finish.

Partner lockups

Where Quantum Robo appears alongside a partner, client or funding body, the two marks sit on a shared optical baseline separated by a 1 px vertical rule with 2X clear space either side of it. Marks are balanced by optical weight rather than by matching height or width — a wide wordmark and a compact monogram are not equal at the same height. Quantum Robo takes the left position when we are the lead supplier and the right when we are a subcontractor.

Never merge, overlap, nest or recolour the two marks to match. Never place a partner logo inside the hexagon.

Displaying client brands

Our portfolio is a genuine asset and it should look like one. When client identities appear on our site or in our materials:

• Use each client's own brand assets and respect their guidelines. Their colours, their correct variant, their clear space. A portfolio that misuses a client's logo advertises exactly the wrong thing about us.
• Do not restyle client marks into our palette. A row of client logos recoloured into Quantum Red is a common shortcut and it is prohibited — it misrepresents their identity and it flattens the evidence that these are real, distinct organisations.
• Normalise optical size, not literal size. Balance the logos by how large they appear, not by bounding box.
• Choose one treatment and hold it. Either all full-colour or all single-colour across a given row. Mixed treatments look accidental.
• Consent before publication. A client is named publicly only with their agreement, and imagery of their sites or systems only with written permission.
• Describe the work, not just the logo. Each portfolio entry should state what we actually built. A wall of marks with no substance behind it is the kind of claim this brand exists to avoid.

Sub-brands

Quantum Robo does not currently operate sub-brands. Product names, where they exist, are set in Montserrat and are subordinate to the parent identity — they do not receive their own mark, palette or typeface. Any proposal for a new lockup comes back to the brand owner in section 16.

Master assets

File naming

quantum-robo_[element]_[ground]_[treatment].[ext] — for example quantum-robo_lockup_dark_flat.svg, quantum-robo_mark_mono-white.eps. Version suffixes are not used on masters; the library holds one current file per asset.

Governance

• Owner. The brand is owned by [ brand owner / role ]. Any new lockup, sub-brand, partner variant or departure from these rules requires their written approval.
• Requests. Asset requests and questions to [ brand email ].
• Review cycle. These guidelines are reviewed annually, and immediately following any change to the identity, the palette or the accessibility standard we work to.
• Third parties. Agencies, contractors, fabricators and partners must be issued this document and the asset library before producing anything carrying the mark. Approval of the final artwork sits with the brand owner, not with the supplier.
• Deviation. If a rule here prevents a genuinely necessary outcome, raise it rather than working around it. The guidelines are a tool, and a rule that repeatedly obstructs good work is a rule to revise in the next version.