HARLEY’S Brand Book — First Edition

The page this system replaces carried fifteen superlatives and anchored none. The rule that answers it: add another proof unit, never a larger one.

Minimum clearspace = one wordmark cap-height, on every side, favicon to facade. Marks shown derive from stand-ins, pending final art.

READS

Body ink clears AAA on surface parchment; secondary holds AA. Muted is a large-label value; amber is never text at 500.

Ratios computed against the parchment grounds — surface #F7F3ED and canvas #EDE8E0 — light scheme.

TRAP 01 · fg-muted as body

4.09:1 · LARGE LABELS ONLY

Muted #7E756A clears only the large floor — labels at 18pt, or 14pt bold. Never body, never captions, never a schedule.

TRAP 02 · light-on-amber

2.79:1 · FAILS AA

Even the system’s own lightest parchment fails on the lamplight amber. The ink on amber is always deep — --on-accent holds primary-900 in both schemes, at 5.34:1.

Ask for --accent-hover and nothing answers. The name does not exist, so the build fails — loudly.

Ninety-two names — 60 primitives, 27 aliases, 5 intent signs — and not one more. A ninety-third is not a shortcut; it is a change to the canon, and the canon is changed by re-adjudication, not by a busy afternoon.

Nothing in this room floats.

A surface comes forward by stepping its fill and drawing a hairline. That is the whole grant — anything more re-opens an adjudicated decision, and that is not done at the workbench.

There is no button.
There is a kept room.

The Button component is substituted by the ProofEnclosure — one per composed view. A named person, a live-dated craft fact, the place, and the telephone number, held in the same field of view. Any one alone is a claim. All four together are a condition.

The telephone is set in the display face on the quiet surface — no underline, no button silhouette. The reading order is the DOM order: person, fact, place, telephone.

BADGE

ALERT

Tabs are the underlined variant. The selected tab carries the underline and the heavier weight, so selection survives greyscale — a hairline marks the state, never a fill.

✓  DO

• Hold one ProofEnclosure per composed view — person, dated fact, place, telephone, in that order; keep --accent to the ring and the rule, with --on-accent ink wherever a field is amber.
• Say every status in a word, set on its wash under a hairline.
• Step elevation with a 1px hairline and a surface change — Card, Dialog, Sheet alike.

✕  DON’T

• A filled amber affordance — lamplight is a ring, a rule, a wash; never a button.
• A status carried by a bare colored dot — color alone reaches no one.
• A rounded corner, or a surface floated on a drop shadow — radius 0 and shadow none are canon.

A glyph labels a function of the house — the ticket, the hours, the telephone — no mascot, no ornamental device. It is admitted only when it helps a person find that function faster than the word alone.

Every glyph is named for its function; resting ink is --fg-secondary, and status colour appears only where the glyph itself carries a state — never for ornament. Focus pairs the ring with a second cue: weight, underline, or position.

Four hues drawn from the room, ordered for color-vision separation; a fifth, --chart-5, carries the ink at #534c42. All derive from the palette by rule — none is hand-picked.

Only S4 clears the 3:1 graphic floor on its own; the paired pattern carries the rest, and every figure still reads in greyscale. Amber is a series here, never a siren.

Every line takes the Carson test.

Could Carson say it out loud, to a customer’s face, without either of them wincing? Each axis fails toward one of the two refused frames — the menswear store or the maison. The test holds the middle.

Words Harley’s never prints — and why.

Each one performs luxury or borrows an app-store register, and a stranger’s ten-second check reads both as costume. The same law retires every exclamation mark and every heading that asks a question. Where a request appears, it is a verb and its noun — “Schedule a Fitting,” “Call (number withheld)” — never “Book now.”

✗  BEFORE · UNANCHORED SUPERLATIVES

“Experience the very best in luxury menswear — world-class service, unrivaled selection, style beyond compare.”

✓  AFTER · PROOF UNITS

“300+ suits and sport coats on the rail. A tailor in the building six days a week. Harley’s, Tyler, Texas — since 1979.”

Hours & Directions

The favicon ships finished artwork; the medallion and wordmark mask-tint to the ink of any ground. Below 16px the wordmark is dropped and the ring medallion stands alone — never the bare H.

HARLEY’S is primary. The partner mark sits outside the enclosure at no more than 0.8× cap height, divided by a hairline rule. Partner color never becomes the ground.

Every ratio on this page is measured from the emitted tokens, and every sample is painted in its token’s real ink. Read the number, then read the words — they agree.

On the warm white surface #f7f3ed the body ink reads 7.66:1 — AAA. One reading exception: the muted label ink #7e756a holds 4.09:1, so it sets labels at 18pt, or 14pt bold, and larger — never body.

Moss, clay, and rust are held at comparable value — a set of repeated signs, not a hierarchy of alarms. Where a status ink falls under 4.5:1, status speaks by wash and hairline, never by colored text.

The working exception: accent-strong #825c34 at 5.38:1 — the amber’s small-scale form, AA for text. The full lamplight amber stays in the ring, the rule, and the wash, where nothing has to be read.

▍  FOCUS · THE RING AND A SECOND CUE

Ring --border-focus holds 6.94:1 on the canvas — well above the 3:1 non-text floor — and it never arrives alone: focus pairs the ring with a second cue, a weight, an underline, a position change. Ink on the amber fill is #1e1b18 at 5.34:1. Tab in; the documented ring is the one you see.

▍  THE WASH NEVER SPEAKS ALONE

Wash, word, and glyph together — grey the page and the ticket still reads. The enclosure obeys the same law in structure: person, dated fact, place, telephone, in DOM order matching the visual order (LAYOUT PRINCIPLE). Reordered, it strands a screen reader in atmosphere before the telephone arrives.

One source of truth. One change gate. One short list of what is never said. The discipline that keeps an unkept promise off the website keeps a local override out of the canon.

VISUAL PRINCIPLE · AVOID

SUB-BRAND FRAMEWORK

Sub-brands take the possessive — Harley’s Formal Wear, Harley’s Tailoring — inherit everything, and never redraw the medallion. If a descriptor cannot be said plainly in conversation, it is not a sub-brand name. The working direction name “Oak Room” stays inside the house; said in public it names a club or a steakhouse, not this store.