Nimsforest · Brand Guide · July 2026
From organization to organism
Who Nimsforest is, how it sounds, and how to use its identity. nimsforest.com is the reference implementation of everything in this document — when in doubt, look there.
1 · Archetype
The Gardener
Not the Hero, too aggressive. Not the Sage, too passive. Not the Magician, too mystical. The Gardener is confident but patient. It does not build the forest. It creates the conditions for one to grow. It knows when to intervene and when to let things emerge.
The archetype shapes everything: product language that reveals rather than imposes, design that breathes rather than crowds, and a tone that is warm, grounded and hopeful.
2 · Tone of voice
Confident, not aggressive. Nimsforest knows what it is. It does not diminish others to stand out.
Patient, not passive. Language reflects emergence, not force: "reveals," not "imposes." "Starts with," not "feeds."
Warm, not casual. Professional but human. Grounded in soil, not sterile. A voice people lean into, not away from.
Hopeful. Always. Organizations can become something better — through care, not control.
Why before how. Lead with the reason, not the mechanism. Name the reader's problem before naming the product's parts.
Plain over precise. "The steps that wait on each other," not "sequential processes." Jargon reads as hiding.
Dry where it earns trust. In technical material, state limits plainly. Admitting what a system cannot do buys belief in what it can.
Round numbers. €5,000, not €4,997. Pricing theatre contradicts the whole voice.
Say it like this
Not
"AI-powered workflow automation platform."
But
"Your tools already know what's happening. Now your organization does too."
Not
"Unlimited sources. Unlimited nims."
But
"Around eight sources. Guidance, not caps."
Not
"Replace headcount with agents."
But
"Nothing to migrate. Nobody to fire."
3 · The mark
The identity is built from emoji. This is deliberate: the glyphs are the product's vocabulary, so the logo teaches the story every time it appears.
Nimsforest
Primary lockup · use by default
🌳 plus the wordmark, baseline-aligned. Wordmark in Figtree 600, tracking −0.01em (1% of the type size, never anything else), at roughly 80% of the glyph's optical height; the gap between them is half the glyph's width. This is the mark for the website, decks, invoices, email signatures and partner listings.
Compact mark
Where the name is already present or space is tight: favicons, app icons, avatars, navigation, event badges.
Extended mark
The full cast, always in flow order. For brand moments: covers, closing slides, page-ending calls to action. Never inside running text.
Short mark
Three glyphs, for footers and secondary pages where the extended mark would crowd.
Clear space & minimum size
Keep clear space equal to the height of the 🌳 glyph on all four sides — nothing enters it, including rules, photo edges and other logos. Minimums: compact mark 24 px on screen, 8 mm in print; primary lockup 120 px or 30 mm wide. Below that, use the wordmark alone.
On light and dark
The glyphs are full-colour and never recoloured, inverted or outlined. Only the wordmark switches: Forest #1D4E32 on light grounds, Birch #FBF7EC on Nightwood. Forest ties the word to the tree so the lockup reads as one object rather than a picture beside some text. Never place the mark over a busy photograph — give it a flat brand ground.
Live character or fixed file — pick by medium
Emoji are drawn by whatever font sits on the reader's device, so the same characters look slightly different on Apple, Android, Windows, Google and Slack. That variation is a feature, not a fault: it makes Nimsforest look native wherever it appears.
Type the character — default
Anywhere the platform renders emoji itself: the website, apps, email, Slack, LinkedIn, Notion, docs, decks, chat, code. Use the real Unicode character so the mark is drawn in that platform's own emoji style and sits naturally beside everything else on screen.
Use the file — where nothing renders
Print, sponsor boards, signage, embroidery, PDFs, favicons, app icons, and anywhere a partner needs a logo asset. Here the artwork is fixed: a vector drawn from Noto Emoji, which is Apache 2.0 licensed and so free to embed, modify and redistribute commercially.
Keep the licence file with the artwork when handing it on. Note that no open emoji set gives exclusivity — the distinctive, registrable part of the identity is the lockup and the wordmark, not the tree.
When someone asks for "the logo" — send exactly this
All drawn from Noto, so every printed piece matches. Digital placements still use the live character.
nimsforest-logo.svg
Primary lockup, vector, transparent. The default answer for print programmes, sponsor boards and partner sites.
nimsforest-logo-dark.svg
The same lockup with the Birch wordmark, for dark backgrounds.
nimsforest-logo-extended.svg
💧 🌳 🍃 ✨ with the wordmark, for covers and stage backdrops.
nimsforest-mark.svg
🌳 alone, square, for avatars, badges and favicons.
nimsforest-mark-extended.svg
The four glyphs alone, without the wordmark.
LICENSE.txt + this guide
So the Noto attribution, clear space, minimum size and the don’ts travel with the files.
Two things to do before the files leave the building. Outline the wordmark — the masters carry it as live Figtree text, and a recipient without the font will substitute Helvetica, which this guide forbids. Then export PNG at the size actually requested (2400 px wide covers most print, 512 px square for app icons) rather than shipping one fixed raster.
One-line description to send alongside: "Nimsforest — the organization organism. Software that turns everything happening in the tools a company already uses into one shared picture, and lets its people and their AI agents act on it."
Don't
Don't reorder the glyphs. The sequence is the story: 💧 → 🌳 → 🍃 → ✨.
Don't substitute lookalikes. 🌲 or 🌴 for 🌳, 🌿 for 🍂, 🌬️ for 🍃 all break meaning.
Don't recolour, outline, add shadows to or rotate the glyphs.
Don't set the wordmark in another typeface, all caps, or with added tracking.
Don't put the mark in a coloured container, circle or rounded box.
Don't use the extended mark in sentences, buttons or navigation.
4 · The vocabulary
Seven glyphs with fixed meanings. They are as protected as the logo: never used decoratively, never given a second meaning, never swapped for a similar-looking emoji. Notation is listed so the exact character survives copy-paste, CMS fields and code. The glyphs in this table are deliberately typed as live characters, not the master artwork — the point here is the character itself, and how it looks on the device you are reading this on. Everywhere else in this document the marks are the locked Noto files.
| Glyph | Means | Shortcode | Unicode | HTML |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 💧 | A drop. One thing an outside system reports. | :droplet: | U+1F4A7 | 💧 |
| 🌊 | The river. Every drop flowing in as one stream. | :ocean: | U+1F30A | 🌊 |
| 🌳 | The forest. The systems a company already runs on, standing together as one place. Also the compact logo. | :deciduous_tree: | U+1F333 | 🌳 |
| 🍂 | A leaf. One understood event, in language the whole forest shares. | :fallen_leaf: | U+1F342 | 🍂 |
| 🍃 | The wind. What carries leaves to whoever should act. | :leaves: | U+1F343 | 🍃 |
| ✨ | A nim. A role where people and AI agents work as one. | :sparkles: | U+2728 | ✨ |
| 🏡 | A treehouse. Deterministic software: work that no longer needs judgment. | :house_with_garden: | U+1F3E1 | 🏡 |
Supporting glyphs
🙂The human inside a nimU+1F642
🤖The AI agent inside a nimU+1F916
🌱A first corner, a small startU+1F331
How to type them
Windows — Win + . opens the emoji picker; search the shortcode name. Alt-codes do not reach these characters.
macOS — Ctrl + Cmd + Space.
Linux — Ctrl + Shift + U, then the code point without "U+", then Enter or Space.
Slack, Notion, GitHub, Jira — type the shortcode.
Copy row — the seven glyphs in flow order, safe to copy straight out of this document:
💧 🌊 🌳 🍂 🍃 ✨ 🏡
5 · Colour
Warm paper, deep forest ink, one gold accent. Everything else is a hairline. The palette is quiet on purpose: the emoji are the only saturated things on the page, and they need room to be seen.
Paper
#FAF6EC
Default background
Band
#F5F0E2
Alternating sections
Card
#FFFDF7
Cards, pills, fields
Clay
#F1EEE1
Callouts, notes
Forest
#1D4E32
Primary. Buttons, links, accents
Nightwood
#12261B
Dark sections
Sunlight
#B4801F
Secondary accent. Eyebrows, rings
Ink
#16261C
Headings, strong text. Never the wordmark
Text greys
Lead paragraphs #24352A · body #4A5A4E · list items #35473A · navigation #5E6F62 · mono labels #6B7C6D. On Nightwood: headings #FBF7EC, body #C3D0C4, accents #C7E0B4. Hairlines are always rgba(22,38,28,0.08–0.14), never solid grey.
Diagram colours
Only for the flow diagram, never for UI: river blue rgba(63,122,140,·), leaf green rgba(110,148,80,·), wind grey rgba(138,154,140,·). Rule: never lighten the mono label grey — #6B7C6D is the lightest value that clears 4.5:1 on Paper.
6 · Typography
A warm display serif for what we claim, a humanist sans for what we explain, and a monospace for what we label. Serif carries the poetry; sans carries the argument.
Aa
Instrument Serif
Headlines and card titles. Regular only, tracking −0.015 to −0.02em, line-height 1.02–1.12. Italic for the emphasised word inside a headline. Fallback: Georgia.
Aa
Figtree
Body, navigation, buttons, UI. 400 for prose, 500 for buttons and nav, 600 for the wordmark and inline emphasis. Body 16.5–18 px at 1.6. Fallback: system sans.
Aa
IBM Plex Mono
Eyebrows, captions, prices, leaf names, technical strings. 11–12 px, uppercase, tracking 0.14–0.16em for labels; sentence case for values.
The Forest heading — one per document
Headings are Ink and body is grey because a page of saturated green is tiring to read, and because Forest has to keep meaning something. But a document is allowed one heading set entirely in Forest #1D4E32: a cover, a section opener, or a single pull quote. It marks the moment the document is actually about. Two of them cancel each other out.
The hand knows what the brain is thinking.
Used once, it lands
Rules
Every section opens with a monospace eyebrow, then a serif heading. That pairing is the brand's signature.
Headings take Ink, body takes grey — the single Forest heading above is the only exception.
One italic word per headline at most. Set it in Forest on light, #C7E0B4 on Nightwood.
Body copy uses text-wrap: pretty; measure never exceeds 34–42em.
Avoid geometric sans (Futura, Montserrat) and cold serifs (Didot, Bodoni). Nothing sterile. Nothing that feels like a bank.
7 · Layout & motion
The brand's structural idea is flow: things travel from where they happen to where they matter. Diagrams show a spine with nodes on it and something moving along it — vertical in tight columns, horizontal when there is room.
Layout
Content column 1160 px, 32 px gutters, sections 76–96 px apart. Radii: 16 px cards, 18–20 px panels, 999 px pills, 10 px fields. Alternate Paper and Band bands down the page, with at most one Nightwood section per view. Space siblings with grid or flex gap, never margins.
Motion
One idea only: a glyph travels a segment and fades. Drops fall from tools to the river; leaves travel from the forest to the nims. Cycles 3.4–4 s, staggered so no two glyphs move in step. ✨ twinkles — the glyph, never its container. Motion is always decorative; nothing important is revealed by it, and it respects reduced-motion preferences.
No illustration, no stock photography, no icon sets. Every graphic is built from type, hairlines, flat grounds and the vocabulary glyphs. If something cannot be drawn that way, it is drawn as a labelled placeholder until real material exists.
8 · Naming
Nimsforest — one word, capital N, no camel case, no space. Never "NimsForest" or "Nims Forest".
nim — lowercase, a common noun: "your nims keep learning." Plural "nims".
Individual nims — capitalised names, like colleagues: Napoleon strategizes, Nectar sells, Nimble talks to customers. Prefer N-names.
forest, river, leaves, wind, treehouse — always lowercase. They are common nouns, not features.
The tagline — "From organization to organism." Sentence case, full stop, "organism" italic where the typography allows.
The descriptor — "The Organization Organism." Used as an eyebrow above the tagline, never as a sentence.
Nimsforest BV · nimsforest.com · brand@nimsforest.com