VERA
Brand kit
VERA looks like the instrument it is.
A rental-intelligence system earns trust by looking calm, precise, and visibly capable. VERA can carry restrained luminous depth and a more futuristic premium finish, but every layer stays in service of the record: colour means one thing at a time, and the interface never performs confidence it has not earned.
The mark
A constructed V made from three open planes. It can read as a folded map, an open record, or a building seen in elevation — the layers VERA brings together: place, evidence, and decision. One short green seam marks the verified path. The mark is fixed; it never scans, spins, or loops.
PRIMARY LOCKUP · DARK
PRIMARY LOCKUP · LIGHT
Rules
- Clear space — keep the height of the mark free on every side of the lockup.
- Minimum size — 24 px for the mark alone, 88 px wide for the full lockup.
- The verification seam is always green. Never recolour it to match a campaign.
- The wordmark is IBM Plex Serif 600 at 0.14em tracking. Never set it in the sans or mono, never italicise it, and never letter-space it further.
- Never enclose the lockup in a box other than the app icon, where the container is a 25% rounded square.
Palette
Warm black, not blue-black — the interface is meant to feel like a room at night rather than a terminal. Restrained low-contrast gradients, translucent glass, and fine hairlines may create hierarchy and depth; they must never compete with a status colour or disguise the boundary between fact and interpretation. Everything else is signal.
The semantic rule that matters most: green means this is good or this is selected. Amber means we do not know yet. Red means we checked and it is bad. Luminous depth may come from neutral surfaces, glass, gradients, and hairlines — never by borrowing a semantic colour for decoration. If a colour is ever used for any other reason, the interface starts lying, and every future signal gets cheaper.
Typography
Three voices, all IBM Plex. The serif gives editorial judgment and key decisions a human cadence; the sans carries explanation and interface language; the mono carries anything a machine produced — identifiers, timestamps, counts, coordinates, and labels. The shift tells a reader whether VERA is interpreting, explaining, or measuring.
2,480
The record stays beside the decision.
Clean buildings, private landlords
When an address resolves cleanly, VERA checks it against available city records and labels what remains unknown.
NEEDS VERIFICATION
≈9 min · $2,000 · 40.8045, −73.9375
Voice
VERA is the friend who reads the lease. Plain, specific, unsentimental, and never cheerful about bad news. It says what it knows, says what it does not, and never pads either.
Do
- “Only seen on a single source — verify independently.”
- “An application fee over $20 is not a red flag, it is illegal.”
- “Nothing clears the bar under this lens.”
- Name the number, then explain it.
Don’t
- “Amazing deal — act fast!”
- “Oops! Something went wrong 😅”
- “No results found.” (Say what was actually searched.)
- Never dress an empty state as a failure. Empty is an answer.
Motion
Motion exists to show causality and system response — a number stepping because a filter changed, a route indicator moving to the active workspace, a panel rising because it opened, or a focused record resolving into the next layer of evidence. It can feel crisp, premium, and quietly futuristic, but never ornamental: no decorative loops, no ambient attention traps, no neon soup. Every transition is interruptible, obeys prefers-reduced-motion, and carries no information that the still interface withholds.
The name
VERA — Verified Evaluation for Rental Analysis. Set in caps, never “Vera”, never possessive in product copy. Referred to as “it”, not “she”: it is an instrument, and pretending otherwise would be the first dishonest thing it does.