lodexa✦
No gradients, everThe name carries the concept. Lodexa draws on the lodestar — the fixed star by which navigators held their course — and the index, the instrument by which knowledge is ordered and found. One part orientation, one part order. That is the entire brand: calm certainty in a complex system.
Write like a senior analyst, not a landing page. Short declaratives. Concrete nouns. One idea per sentence. If a claim needs an exclamation mark, it isn’t a claim — it’s a wish.
Plain over clever. Our readers process hundreds of pages of programme documentation a week. Clarity is the luxury we offer. If a ten-year-old and a director-general read the same sentence, both should understand it.
Evidence over adjectives. Replace every superlative with a number, a source, or silence. “Comprehensive coverage” is weaker than “every Horizon Europe grant since 2014.”
Europe in the room. We write with institutional respect — for the missions, the public money, and the people who steward it. Dry wit is welcome. Cynicism is not.
“Unlock the power of AI to supercharge your funding strategy! 🚀”
“See where the next seven years of European research funding will go — before the calls open.”
“Our cutting-edge platform leverages machine learning to deliver actionable insights.”
“Every figure in Lodexa traces back to its source document. Ask it why, and it will show you.”
“We’re on a mission to revolutionise institutional decision-making across Europe.”
“Public research money is Europe’s most consequential investment. We help it land well.”
The wordmark is set lowercase in our grotesk, tightened to −4% tracking — modern, unadorned, confident enough not to shout. Beside it sits the Lodestar: a constructed four-point star, our fixed point. At small scale it reads as a footnote marker — fitting, for a company built on provenance.
Primary wordmark on Paper. Default in all communication.
Reversed on Ink — the primary surface for product, web and pitch. Star shifts to Lapis Soft.
Monochrome on Lapis. Ceremonial use — covers, signage, end-frames.
The Lodestar alone. Favicon, app icon, watermark, and the inline marker (✦) calling out sourced figures.
No gradients. No neon. The palette is drawn from the materials of European institutions — archival paper, printer’s ink, and lapis lazuli, the pigment once reserved for what mattered most. The system runs on two grounds: Paper for the long read, Ink for the cinematic moment.
Lapis works on Paper; Lapis Soft is its partner on Ink, where #1E3A8A reads too dark. For data visualisation, extend each into a tonal scale (#1E3A8A → #8FA4E8 → #D6DDF5) before introducing any second hue. A Lodexa chart should be readable printed in greyscale — if it isn’t, the chart is wrong, not the palette.
Lodexa speaks in a single typeface. Switzer — a precise, neutral grotesk — carries everything from a 110-pixel headline to a 12-pixel source line. Display is set in Medium, large, and tight (−4.5% tracking); emphasis is carried by one Lapis word, never by italics. One instrument, played across its full range.
Edition 02 retires the serif display face. A single grotesk reads as more confident, more contemporary, and unmistakably ours — and removes the scholarship-vs-software tension that diluted the earlier system. The licensed production face is Söhne; Switzer is the free, near-identical web and document substitute.
Slides inherit the web system wholesale: Ink title frames, Paper data frames, one accent, direct-labelled charts. The Lodestar marks the page; the ✦ marks a sourced figure.
Business card — 85 × 55 mmCross-programme tracing of €95.5bn in commitments, resolved to the institutions that received it and the follow-on it produced.
Within three years, institutions that coordinate across borders raise roughly twice the subsequent funding of those that do not.
The brief is the product in print: a claim, a chart, and the ✦ that lets a reader follow any figure back to its source.
Social — launch announcement (1:1)Even at 1:1 the rules hold: Ink or Lapis ground, the constellation, one statement, the wordmark. No stock imagery, no decoration.
No stock handshakes, no glowing brains, no abstract gradient blobs. Use: archival and cartographic material, European institutional architecture in flat daylight, close detail of paper and instruments. Duotone in Ink when photography must sit with the brand — grayscale that warms to full colour on interaction.
Hairline rules (1px) organise every layout, like a well-set table of contents. The Lodestar ✦ marks verified figures throughout product and print — our hallmark. The constellation — points of the record resolving toward one star — is the signature device. Charts are flat, labelled directly, never 3D.
Motion is how the brand proves it is alive without raising its voice. Every movement discloses structure or shows the record working — nothing moves to entertain. Easing is long and confident (cubic-bezier(.22,.61,.21,1)), and the whole system stands still and fully legible for anyone who prefers reduced motion.
A field of faint points drifts in strata behind the hero — the public record in motion. It parts around the cursor and resolves into a constellation around the Lodestar. This is the one ambient, ongoing motion.
Headlines rise line by line through a mask; rules draw themselves; figures count up; images wipe open. Motion shows how a thing is built — order emerging from complexity, the brand idea made literal.
The star is the single element permitted to be expressive — it can twinkle, draw in, pulse gently. Everything else stays composed. Nothing bounces, nothing spins for effect.