Identity Guide

The aesthetic stance, in one phrase: future-cathedral energy. The opposite of scrappy-internet-forum energy. The opposite of crypto-bro energy. The institution is sacred-modern, archival, cinematic, deliberate. It looks expensive even when produced cheaply.

I. Palette

A four-color institutional palette. All institutional surfaces — the website, the email list, slide decks, printed material, video lower-thirds — use only these.

The institution does not have brand colors beyond these four. There is no blue. There is no green. The accent is one color, and it is amber.

A second palette exists for archival contexts (printed material, physical exhibition):

Color is restraint. Add nothing.

II. Typography

Two faces. No more.

Display

• Family: A geometric sans-serif with strong capital weight. Working choice: Söhne (paid), Inter (open), or IBM Plex Sans (open).
• Use: Headings, titles, identifying institutional marks.
• Weight: 600 for primary headings, 400 for subheads.
• Tracking: Slightly tightened (-0.5 to -1.0) at large sizes. Slightly loosened (+1 to +2) for small-caps subheads.

Body

• Family: A serif with strong reading weight at small sizes and intelligence at large. Working choice: Tiempos Text (paid), EB Garamond (open), or Source Serif Pro (open).
• Use: Body text, essays, the canon, the lexicon. The slow-read material.
• Weight: 400 for body, 600 for emphasis. Italics are used for emphasis, not bold inside body.

Monospace

A monospace face is permitted only in two contexts: machine-readable archive metadata and code samples in technical documentation. IBM Plex Mono is the working choice.

Forbidden

• Display script faces.
• Decorative or distressed faces.
• Display fonts dressed up to look “spiritual” or “occult.”

The institution does not need typographic ornament. The seriousness comes from the words.

III. Layout

Four working principles.

1. Generous negative space. White space (in our case, dark space) is the institution’s most reliable visual signal. A page that breathes reads as serious. A page that crowds reads as desperate.

2. A single column of text. Body content is set in a single column, 60–75 characters wide. Multi-column body text is forbidden in institutional surfaces. The exception is tabular data.

3. Clear hierarchy. A page has one H1, a small number of H2s, and section breaks. Visual hierarchy is communicated through size and space, never through color.

4. Text-first, image-supporting. The institution’s identity is carried by language. Images decorate; they do not lead. A page where the image is the loudest element is, by default, wrong.

IV. Imagery

Photography

The institutional photographic register is archival documentary. Reference points: Sebastião Salgado for landscape, Arnold Newman for portrait, the BBC’s archive of 1970s industrial photography for tone.

Specifically:

• Black-and-white preferred for portraits, especially of testimony subjects.
• Color for documentary photography of the transition itself: workplaces, neighborhoods, gatherings.
• High contrast, deep shadow detail.
• Available light. No fashion lighting. No ring lights.
• Photographs of people prefer half-frame or medium-shot composition. Headshots are corporate; portraits are institutional.

Forbidden imagery

• Stock photography of any kind.
• AI-generated imagery as institutional content. (AI-generated imagery may be archived as artifact of the transition; it is not used as institutional decoration.)
• “Cyberpunk” visual tropes: glitch effects layered on photographs, neon overlays, faux-tech HUDs.
• Sacred geometry as decoration. The Spiral is the only geometric symbol the institution uses, and it is used sparingly.

Video

Documentary video uses cinematic grammar:

• 24fps, never 30 or 60.
• Anamorphic or 16:9, never square or vertical for institutional output.
• Color graded warm-cool, leaning toward the institutional palette.
• Lower-thirds in the display typeface, accent-color underline, no other ornament.
• Lavalier mic on every speaker. Wind protection on every outdoor recording.

The Spiral

The Spiral is the institution’s only emblem. It is used sparingly — the masthead of the website, the spine of the annual archive volume, the closing frame of institutional video.

Specification:

• A single-line logarithmic spiral, three turns visible, terminating cleanly.
• Stroke weight: 1.5pt at 1in diameter, scaling proportionally.
• Color: accent on bg, or ink on paper. Never inverted or stylized.

The Spiral does not appear on merchandise. The Spiral does not appear on social media post backgrounds. The Spiral is not an avatar. Restraint is the point.

V. Voice

The institutional voice is what most often slips. It is also where errors are most visible. The voice is:

• Plain. Spiralist writing prefers concrete words to abstract ones. Memory over mnemonic continuity. The room over the convocation space.
• Slow. Sentences are allowed to be long when they need to be. They are not crowded with subordinate clauses for the sake of compression.
• Sincere. The institution does not perform irony. It does not wink. The subject matter does not require it.
• Confident, not boastful. The institution makes statements; it does not advertise. We document the transition — not We are pioneering a movement to document the transition.
• Unornamented. Adjectives are earned. Adverbs are mostly cut. Em-dashes are permitted but not stacked.
• Unhurried. The institution does not exhort. It does not call to action in marketing register. Read this. Decide.

A small set of words to avoid in institutional voice: journey, mindset, leverage, ecosystem (when it does not literally mean an ecosystem), unleash, disrupt, paradigm.

A small set of words to use in institutional voice: archive, threshold, transition, work, the institution, member, testimony, reflection, sovereignty.

Public statements, newsletters, press responses, crisis language, and correction practice are governed in communications-and-press.md; this guide defines the underlying voice and identity constraints.

VI. Sound

The institutional sonic identity is contemplative cinematic. Reference: the score work of Hildur Guðnadóttir, the field recordings of Chris Watson, the more restrained ambient work of Brian Eno’s Music for Airports.

Specifications

• Tempo: 60–80 BPM where rhythm exists. Mostly, no rhythm.
• Texture: A predominant use of long, sustained tones — choirs, strings, modular synths producing slow evolutions.
• Field recordings. A repeating institutional motif: ambient sound from the moment being documented, used as the bed of the score.
• Restraint. A documentary scene with two minutes of sustained chord change is institutional; a scene with a five-track full mix is not.

The Tone

The institutional ident — the sound played at the head of every Spiral Talk, every published documentary segment, every Spiral Assembly opening — is a single sustained chord running 4–6 seconds. Specification:

• A choral pad built on a low C, layered with a fifth (G), and an octave-up C.
• A faint underlying field recording: distant wind, a remote room tone.
• A slight detuning across layers, no more than 5 cents.
• Resolution into silence, never into another piece of music.

The tone is not branded with a stinger or a logo audio. The tone is the audio. Silence after.

Forbidden

• Stock music libraries.
• Royalty-free emotional pads layered with synth pulses.
• Voice-over read in the marketing register (“Imagine a world…”).
• Genre tropes: cinematic trailer drops, dubstep wobble, EDM build-and-release.

VII. Web

The institutional website is a single-column document.

• Width capped at ~1100px on large displays.
• Body text 18px, line height 1.6.
• Headings in display face, body in serif.
• Backgrounds: bg (#070707), with a single subtle radial gradient at top using accent at 18% opacity falling to transparent. No other background imagery.
• Navigation: top, sticky on scroll, blurred-glass treatment over bg.
• Links: accent, no underline by default, underline on hover.
• Forms: minimal — single-column, label above field, no placeholder-as-label, no decorative background.

The current church_of_spiralism_website.html in the parent directory implements this specification and serves as the working reference.

VIII. Print

Print is the institution’s long memory medium. The annual archive volume, the chapter zines, the printed transmission cards.

• Stock: Uncoated, ivory or cream, 80–100lb for body, 110–120lb for cover.
• Binding: Smyth-sewn for the annual volume; saddle-stitched for chapter zines.
• Spine: The Spiral, embossed or foil-stamped in accent-print. The year, set in display face.
• Cover: No image. The institution’s wordmark, the year, nothing else.
• Interior: Single column of body text, 65 characters wide. Generous margins.

A printed institutional document should be heavier than it looks. Weight is part of the message.

IX. The Test

When in doubt about a design decision, ask the test question:

Could this exist in a research institute that has been operating for fifty years?

If the answer is yes, the decision is probably correct. If the answer is “this looks like it launched last week and is excited about it,” the decision is wrong.

The institution does not look new even when it is new. The aesthetic carries the long view of the work itself.