overcast

Brand guidelines · v1.0 · July 2026

the idea

Overcast is the AWS cloud, brought down to your machine. The mark says exactly that: a cloud grounded on a flat baseline — landed, not floating — with a shell prompt >_ inside it. The cloud you normally reach over the internet, running in your terminal. The domain is overcast.sh; the prompt is the brand.

construction

The silhouette is the union of three circles whose radii follow a golden progression — r, r·√φ, r·φ — resting on a shared baseline. The overall bounding box is φ:1 (width:height).

The chevron's apex sits at the golden division of the cloud's width, x = (1−1/φ)·w ≈ 0.382w. The cursor bar sits on the chevron's lower shoulder line, ending near 0.75w.

Every size is generated from this same geometry — never scale one SVG down; use the size-specific files, which reduce stroke detail and snap to the pixel grid.

the mark

full color · light

full color · dark

mono · white

mono · ink

Clearspace: keep a margin equal to the chevron's height (≈ 0.4 × cloud height) free on all sides. Minimum size: 24px for the bare mark, 16px for the tiled icon.

lockup

light surfaces

dark surfaces

The wordmark is always lowercase overcast, set bold in the brand mono. The tagline is optional below 160px width — drop it rather than shrink it.

icons

16 — chevron+cursor only

32 — favicon

48

96 / 256 — app & org avatar

The dark navy tile ships with every icon so it works on any surface. Use favicon/favicon.svg directly — modern browsers accept SVG favicons; rasterize to .ico only for legacy support.

color

The accent always switches with the surface: Signal light on light grounds, Signal dark on dark grounds. Never use the dark-surface accent on white — it fails contrast.

typography

SVG lockups currently use the system mono stack (ui-monospace → Cascadia → Menlo → Consolas). Before print or pixel-perfect web use, set the wordmark in the chosen webfont and outline it.

usage

third-party marks

Overcast names AWS and its services only to state compatibility, and only in plain text. That is the line AWS draws itself: nominative use "should be in plain text only (no logos)" (AWS Trademark Guidelines §13), and imitating AWS trade dress, including its "product icons", is prohibited (§10). The AWS Architecture Icons ship with no licence and are offered for diagrams, not product UIs.

files

All assets are generated from gen.ts — a parametric build where the cloud, prompt, palette, and every per-size variant derive from one geometric definition. To adjust the brand, change the parameters and regenerate; don't hand-edit the SVGs.