// Brand

Brand guidelines

How the mark, the palette, the type, and the voice behave - so a proposal, a slide, an email signature, and this website all read as the same company.

Last updated: September 10, 2026

Everything below is already in use somewhere - on this site, in the deck, in the signature block at the bottom of every email we send. This page is where those decisions are written down so they can be repeated without guessing.

Assets link straight to the files this site serves. Hotlink them from vulpinemsp.com in anything that renders over the network, and download them for anything that does not.

// Colour

Palette

One accent and nothing else as decoration. Rank is carried by how deep the background sits, never by a border, a glow, or a size change.

Logo colours

A record of the mark’s own palette. These four never appear in an interface.

Colour Name Hex Token Use
Vulpine orange #ED9139 --logo-orange The mark’s body.
Vulpine yellow #FFF000 --logo-yellow The eyes. Nothing else.
Black #000000 --logo-black The nose.
White #FEFFFF --logo-white Knockout and negative space.

Accent

Two oranges, and the difference matters: --accent is a fill and fails contrast as small text, --accent-text is the one you set type in.

Colour Name Hex Token Use
Accent #E67E22 --accent Fills, chips, rules, buttons.
Accent text #ED9139 --accent-text Small orange text and links. 5.00:1 on the field.
Accent hover #EE9440 --accent-hover Button hover fill only.
On accent #1B222B --on-accent Text sitting on an orange fill.

Surfaces

Field → shade → panel → deep. To emphasise something, drop it a level and brighten its text.

Colour Name Hex Token Use
Field #2E3742 --surface-field Page background.
Shade #242C36 --surface-shade The hero panel’s second stop.
Panel #222A34 --surface-panel The default card.
Raised #313B48 --surface-raised Hover state. Web only.
Deep #161C24 --surface-deep Emphasis, featured, inverted band.

Text

Six steps, ordered by contrast. --text-faint is the only one with a size floor.

Colour Name Hex Token Use
Primary #EAEEF3 --text-primary Headings on field and panel.
Bright #FFFFFF --text-bright Headings on deep only.
Body #CBD4DE --text-body Body copy on field and panel.
Quiet #A9B4C1 --text-quiet Subheads, contact lines, ledes.
Muted #9AA6B4 --text-muted The smallest permitted text colour. 4.87:1.
Faint #7C8896 --text-faint Decorative or 24px and larger. 3.34:1.

On white

Email, print, and any slide on a light background. The site palette is tuned for a dark field and goes illegible on paper - these three are its light-ground siblings.

Colour Name Hex Token Use
Ink #1B222B - Headings and names on white. Never pure black.
Deep orange #B85C0B - Links and accents on white. 4.59:1.
Grey #5A6673 - Secondary lines on white. 5.85:1.

Two status colours - teal #6BD2BC and coral #E8705C - exist only inside before-and-after comparisons. They are not general interface colour and never appear as decoration.

// Typography

Three faces, one job each

Never mixed, never swapped. Only the monospace face is ever letter-spaced - display and body are never tracked.

Display 400 · 500 · 600 · 700

ABCDEFGHIJKLM 0123456789

Libre Franklin on the web · Franklin Gothic Medium in Office and the deck

Headings, stats, prices.

Body 400 · 700

ABCDEFGHIJKLM 0123456789

Carlito on the web · Calibri in Office and the deck

Paragraphs, list items, table cells.

Label 400 · 500

ABCDEFGHIJKLM 0123456789

IBM Plex Mono on the web · Consolas in Office and the deck

Eyebrows, kickers, step numbers, tags.

Quote 400

ABCDEFGHIJKLM 0123456789

Georgia on the web · Georgia in Office and the deck

The opening quotation glyph. Nothing else, ever.

None of the three deck faces ships as a webfont, so the site uses the closest open matches and self-hosts them - no third-party font request on a site that sells privacy. In Office, keep the original three. In email, keep the fallback chain: no client loads a webfont.

// Geometry

The geometry is the brand

Two snipped shapes carry the whole identity. There is no third shape, and corner radius is zero everywhere.

The chip

Top-right corner cut at 40%. Every bullet, checkmark, list marker, and step marker on every surface. Never a round dot, never an icon font, never emoji.

22px · 14px · 11px, in --accent.

The card

A small snip at top-left and a larger one at bottom-right. The top-left cut is a constant 7px and never scales; the bottom-right grows with the element, from 14px on a row band to 40px on a full panel.

Borders and drop shadows are not the elevation device - depth is.

// Email

Signatures

One layout, table-based, on white. It is the most-seen piece of brand we own, and it is the easiest to quietly wreck.

Vulpine Solutions

Marc Montecalvo

Founder & CEO

  • (727) 312-9686
  • marc@vulpinemsp.com
  • vulpinemsp.com

Riverview, FL · Serving greater Tampa Bay

The live signature, rendered at its 560px maximum width. Open the source file, select all, and paste it into the Outlook signature box - then change the name, title, phone, and address.

// Never

  • Attach the images. They hotlink from vulpinemsp.com so they cache once and never arrive as a paperclip.
  • Add a quote, a slogan, or an emoji.
  • Add a confidentiality disclaimer. It is not a legal control and it doubles the block.
  • Add social icons, certification badges, or a second logo.
  • Underline the links or let the client colour them blue.

Specification

Element Face Size and treatment Colour
Company line IBM Plex Mono → Consolas 11px · 500 · uppercase · 0.15em #1B222B
Name Libre Franklin → Franklin Gothic Medium → Arial 21px / 26px · 600 #1B222B
Title IBM Plex Mono → Consolas 11px · 500 · uppercase · 0.124em #B85C0B
Phone, email, web Carlito → Calibri → Segoe UI 14px · 400 · no underline #B85C0B
Area line Carlito → Calibri → Segoe UI 12px / 18px · 400 #5A6673
Tile tile-2026.png on #161C24 76 × 229 #161C24
Base rule accent-2026.png, stretched 3px tall, full width #ED9139

Hosted assets: /brand/sig/tile-2026.png (76×229 as placed), /brand/sig/accent-2026.png (stretched to a 3px rule), and /brand/sig/fox-mark-2026.png where a square mark is needed instead of the tile.

// Voice

How it reads

Direct, specific, slightly wry. The register that gets it wrong is the one that could describe any provider.

Sentence case, always

Headlines, buttons, slide titles, subject lines. Request an IT assessment, never Request an IT Assessment. The only uppercase on any surface is a monospace label.

Second person, concrete

“You didn’t start your business to be its IT department.” Short declarative sentences, real numbers, no hedging. Not “our collaborative partnership approach ensures scalable outcomes.”

No emoji. Anywhere.

Not in copy, not in slides, not in email, not in social posts. The marker system is the chip; there is no second one.

Smart quotes and em dashes

Curly quotes and apostrophes. Do not use em dashes or en dashes as prose punctuation. Prefer periods, commas, colons, and parentheses. Straight quotes read as unedited draft.

Numbers are load-bearing

Every figure is sourced or derived from a stated model. If you cannot point at where it came from, cut it rather than round it.

One call to action

“Request an IT assessment.” Never introduce a competing action on the same surface.

Facts that must match everywhere

Directory listings, the Google Business Profile, proposals, slides, and email all use these strings verbatim. No street address is ever published.

Legal name Vulpine Solutions, LLC
Display name Vulpine Solutions
Tagline Smart IT. Silent Security.
Phone (727) 312-9686
Email contact@vulpinemsp.com
Web vulpinemsp.com
Area Riverview, FL · Serving greater Tampa Bay
Hours Mon-Fri, 8:00 AM-5:30 PM Eastern Time (ET)
Boilerplate Vulpine Solutions is a veteran-owned managed IT and cybersecurity provider based in Riverview, Florida, serving medical practices and professional services firms across the greater Tampa Bay area, with remote support nationwide.

Pair the hours with 24/7 monitoring and 24/7 P1 response. Never write a bare “24/7 support.”

// Templates

Decks and social

Start from the template. A deck rebuilt from scratch drifts on slide two, and it is always the type that goes first.

Slide deck

The PowerPoint template carries the palette, the snip geometry, and the three Office faces - Franklin Gothic Medium for titles, Calibri for body, Consolas for labels. Use its layouts rather than dropping text boxes onto a blank slide.

Coming soon - the file is not published here yet.

Canva

A brand kit and a set of social templates, so a one-off graphic does not need a designer or a colour picker. It will link from here once it is built out.

Coming soon.

Using these somewhere

Ask before you improvise

If something you need is not on this page - a format, a lockup, a layout - ask for it rather than inventing a style that then has to be undone.