Accountants
Brand guidelines
Everything needed to set a page, a document or a deck that looks like us. Values here are the ones the live site uses, so this page is the reference rather than a proposal.
Logo and wordmark
The mark is a court seen from above: a square with the net across it. The wordmark is set live in Anton, not supplied as artwork, so it stays crisp at any size.
Accountants
Accountants
Keep clear space equal to the height of the mark on every side. Nothing sits inside it, including rules and photo edges.
Mark 24px on screen, 8mm in print. Primary lockup 28px on screen, 10mm in print, below which the second line closes up.
"Padel" is always lime, "Accountants" always off-white. On light grounds both go petrol #0B272E and the net line stays lime.
Padel Accountants is a trading name of Rebel Two Limited. Anything contractual carries the registered name, not the wordmark.
Colour
Four petrol grounds, one accent, five inks. The accent marks the one thing that matters on a given screen, so it appears sparingly.
Signal coral is the only third colour, and it always means something is wrong or needs attention: a form error, an overdue item, an adverse variance, a "don't" marker in documentation like this page. It is never decorative, never a background for copy, and never appears in the same block as lime.
Body text holds at least 4.5:1 against its ground. Never tint type with opacity to soften it: pick the next ink down instead.
Typography
Four faces, each with one job. If a piece of text does not obviously belong to one of them, it is body copy.
States and feedback
Lime means this is the thing to act on. Coral means something needs attention. Nothing else changes colour on its own.
One sentence, full stop, says what to do rather than what failed. "We need an email address to reply to." Never "Invalid input", never a field name shouted back.
At the field, on submit, all at once, with focus moved to the first one. No inline validation while someone is still typing a field for the first time.
Coral is the only warning colour. No red, no amber, no icons, no tinted field backgrounds.
The field carries aria-invalid and the message sits next to it in the reading order, so the error survives without the coral being seen.
We reply within one working day, usually sooner.
Answer any of these and we will come to the call with a tier and a number already worked out.
Layout and spacing
One content column, hairline-divided cells, generous vertical air between sections. The structure does the work that borders and cards would otherwise do.
Centred, with a 72px minimum side gutter. Sections run full width; only the content inside is constrained.
Top and bottom, rising to 148px where a section needs isolating. Never below 76px.
Cell groups are a grid with a 1px gap over a rule-coloured background, so the dividing line is the gap itself.
The only exception is the 2px radius on small status badges such as "Soon".
Heading left, a one-sentence standfirst right, a rule beneath both. Consistent across every page, which is what makes the pages feel like one site.
Paragraphs cap between 520px and 700px. Long copy never runs the full 1200px.
Primary is a lime block with petrol type. Secondary is a 1.5px petrol-grey outline with off-white type. Both square, both mono uppercase, never more than two side by side.
Grids wrap on their own using auto-fit with a sensible minimum. No fixed heights on anything holding text.
Tone of voice
We are accountants who understand courts, coaches and booking platforms. The writing should sound like someone who has seen the numbers, not someone selling.
"Closed in six working days" rather than "fast turnaround". If a claim has a number behind it, use the number.
Short sentences, ordinary words, no exclamation marks and no jokes. Regulated firms earn trust by being precise.
Fees, exclusions and what happens next are stated openly. Nothing reads "contact us for a quote".
Court utilisation, coach employment status, platform payouts. Use the operator's vocabulary, but explain anything an investor would not know.
Photography
Real venues, real light. Photography sets the scene and then gets out of the way of the numbers.
Courts, glass, netting, clubhouse interiors, an operator at work. Wide enough to read as a venue rather than a sport stock shot.
Cool, slightly desaturated, deep shadows. Images sit behind a petrol overlay so type holds contrast without a scrim box.
Square-edged, full-bleed within its cell, no rounded corners or borders. Landscape for banners, 1200×630 for the share card.
Cheering stock models, trophies, handshakes, laptops on desks. Nothing that could belong to any accountancy firm.
Do and don't
The failure modes that come up most often, paired with what to do instead.
Lime marks the figure or the action. Two lime elements in one cell and neither leads.
The one exception is the contact block, which is deliberately a full lime panel with petrol type.
A 1px gap over a rule-coloured ground separates cells cleanly at any size.
Rounded, floating cards read as a generic software site and break the court geometry.
Prices, KPIs and dates all in IBM Plex Mono so columns of numbers align.
It tightens into an illegible block. Use Archivo Narrow 600 for anything smaller.
White space is part of the look. A thin section beats a padded one.
Four faces cover display, heading, body and data. Anything else is a mistake, including a decorative script.
Slack
Preferences, then Themes. Paste the string into the box at the bottom of the custom theme panel.
The mention badge is #B8482A, not the #FF8F6B coral. Slack sets the unread count in white, which reads at about 2.3:1 on the coral; this is the same hue taken down in lightness until the count is legible.
Older Slack versions offer eight fields rather than ten. Drop the last two values, which set the top nav.
Assets
The marks and ACCA files are SVG. The lockup is PNG at 1952px: the wordmark is live Anton type, so a vector lockup needs the type outlined first. For anything set fresh, use Anton from the spec above rather than scaling the PNG.
Fonts come from Google Fonts: Anton, Archivo Narrow (500, 600, 700), Chivo (400, 500, 700) and IBM Plex Mono (400, 500, 600).
Accountants