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Adret Guidelines

An architecture studio for private houses. Every house is drawn from where the sun falls on its site.

Introduction

Adret’s home page: a valley seen from above, the sunny slope lit and the shaded slope dark, under “Every house is drawn from where the sun falls.” — The home page’s first screen. The pointer is the sun: move it and the light on the valley turns from morning to evening.

Adret is an architecture studio that designs private houses. Before a wall is drawn, the studio studies how the sun crosses the site through the day and the year, and every plan starts from that study. In the Alps, the adret is the slope that faces the sun and the ubac the slope in shade; the studio takes its name from the first.

The mark is a room in shade with the patch of light a window throws across its floor: a dark square and one light parallelogram. The patch follows a rule. Its length, depth and floor line never change; only its lean turns, following the sun through the house’s main window, so each house can carry its own patch.

Two colours carry the brand: Ubac, the shade, and Lime, limewashed plaster in sun. Everything else is material: stone, oak, brass, tracing paper. The brand should feel like a monograph by a serious house architect: quiet, exact, and warm where the light falls.

At a glance

Logo

Colours

Lime#EDE8DF
Ubac#22282B
Stone#CFC7B8

Type

Aa Montserrat
Aa IBM Plex Mono

Line

Drawn from where the sun falls.

Brand kit

39 files · 1.5 MB

Download the zip

Wordmark scale

64 px
52 px
40 px
32 px
24 px
18 px
14 px

The square comes first and the word follows it, the capitals as tall as the patch reaches and standing on the square’s base line. Use the lockup wherever there is room: hoardings, title blocks, the website’s bar, letterheads. Use the square alone for the plaque, the favicon, the profile picture and a book’s spine. The wordmark alone is for places where the square is already in view. Never redraw, respace or rearrange them.

Mark construction

The patch on a 24-unit square: 13 long, 6 deep, its lower edge 3 above the base, centred, leaning 3 : 2 (56.3°). Per house only the lean turns, from 90° (sun straight in) to 41°, mirrored when the sun comes from the right; length, depth, floor line and area stay fixed.

Signature

Ubac on Lime is the signature: the hoarding, the drawing, the card, the website. Use it on any warm light ground: plaster, paper, linen.

On Ubac the square becomes a frame and the patch stays light. A plain inversion would turn the patch dark and lose the idea, so on a dark ground the ground is the shade.

Three cuts

SquareThe room in shade and its patch of light. The favicon, the profile picture, the spine of a book.

OutlinedThe room as a frame one sixteenth of its side, the patch solid. For engraving small plaques, and the light artwork on dark grounds.

WordmarkFive heavy, calm capitals. The A’s diagonals and the R’s leg lean like the patch; the A’s crossbar sits low, like a floor line.

Small sizes

Lockup, 120 px wide
Square, 32 px
Square, 16 px
Wordmark, 14 px

Clear space

Clear space is the patch’s depth, 6 units of the 24-unit square, on every side. Nothing else enters it: no text, edge or picture.

Logo on your background

Ground

Use the dark artwork: 12.2:1 against this ground. Logos need at least 3:1 (WCAG 2, non-text contrast).

Please don’t

Don’t stretch the square. The room is always square and the patch keeps its proportions.

Don’t tilt it. The floor line is level; only the patch’s lean may turn, by the rule.

Don’t recolour it. Ubac or Lime; brass only as the metal of a plaque.

Don’t set it on a mid-grey that swallows the shade. Check the ground with the tool above.

Don’t add shadows or glows. The only light in the mark is the patch.

Don’t fade it. The shade is solid.

Core palette

Lime

Ubac

Stone

Slate

Brass

Sunline

Two colours from the mark carry everything: Ubac, the shade, and Lime, the light. Stone and Slate are the same shade at lower volume, for panels, rules and captions. Brass is the studio’s metal, on the plaque and the door. Sunline appears once, wherever the sun’s angle is drawn. CMYK values are a plain device conversion for reference; proof Lime and Brass against printed swatches.

Color proportions

Lime46%

Ubac26%

Stone12%

Slate8%

Brass5%

Sunline3%

Lime carries most of every surface and Ubac carries the words. Stone and Slate support; Brass and Sunline appear once at most.

Readable combinations

AaUbac on Lime12.2:1AAA
AaLime on Ubac12.2:1AAA
AaSlate on Lime5.1:1AA
AaUbac on Stone8.8:1AAA
AaSlate on Stone3.7:1AA Large
AaUbac on Brass5.3:1AA
AaSunline on Ubac7.6:1AAA
AaBrass on Lime2.2:1Fail

Slate on Stone is for 18.66 px bold or larger. Brass on Lime fails for text: it is the plaque’s metal and a line colour, never a word. Ratios are WCAG 2 contrast, measured on the sRGB values above: AAA from 7:1, AA from 4.5:1, AA Large from 3:1 (large or bold text only).

Check a pairing

Text

Ground

AaLime on Ubac

12.2:1AAA

Type system

Every house is drawn from where the sun falls.
Statements, headings and text, as on the website: medium 500 for statements at 48 px on 52 px lines, regular 400 for text at 17 px. Wide and geometric like the wordmark, so the letters and the logo speak alike. By Julieta Ulanovsky, SIL Open Font License 1.1, on Google Fonts; about 40 KB a weight as WOFF2 (Latin). This preview doesn’t load it yet, so the line above falls back to your system’s face.
Sun 56° · south-east · 09:40
Drawing notes, sun angles, dates and the title block, in capitals or figures at 11 to 13 px. It reads like the annotations on a plotted drawing. By Mike Abbink and Bold Monday for IBM, SIL Open Font License 1.1, on Google Fonts; about 25 KB a weight as WOFF2 (Latin). This preview doesn’t load it yet, so the line above falls back to your system’s face.

Click any specimen line to try your own words.

Type scale

Base17 px

Ratio

Perfect fourth 1.333

DisplayMontserrat · 500 · 71.5px · 4.472rem
Where the sun falls.
Heading 1Montserrat · 500 · 53.7px · 3.355rem
Every house is drawn from where the sun falls.
Heading 2Montserrat · 500 · 30.2px · 1.888rem
We plot the light on the site before we draw a single wall.
Heading 3Montserrat · 500 · 22.7px · 1.416rem
House on a south slope · Sun study
BodyMontserrat · 500 · 17px · 1.063rem
Each house begins with a study of how the sun crosses its site through the day and the year. The plan follows the light.
CaptionMontserrat · 500 · 12.8px · 0.797rem
Architecture studio · Private houses

Tone of voice

Adret speaks like an architect walking a client across their land in the morning: few words, all of them exact, and always about the place.

Sentences are short and concrete. They name the slope, the window, the hour and the angle. The light is the subject, not the studio.

The site speaks first

Every line starts from the land and the light on it, never from the studio’s taste. Clients are trusting the studio with a house they will live in for decades, so the voice is calm, specific and never sells.

Name the light

Say where the sun is, when and at what angle. A real measure beats an adjective.

Say	Avoid
The kitchen takes the sun from seven until eleven.	Light-filled spaces you’ll love.
Sun 56° from the south-east, at 9:40 in March.	Bright, airy, stunning interiors.

Quiet, not modest

Few words and plain ones. Confidence comes from the precision, not the volume.

Say	Avoid
We plot the light on the site before we draw a single wall.	Award-worthy, visionary architecture!

The house, not the studio

Write about the site and the people who will live there. The studio is the one listening.

Say	Avoid
Your site faces south-east. The house will open that way.	Our signature style transforms every home.

Site hoarding

The Adret lockup painted large in Ubac on a Lime plywood hoarding in front of a timber-framed house going up on a sunny hillside

The lockup painted on the hoarding of a house in progress, the first thing a neighbour sees. Paint on plywood, the grain and the panel joints showing through.

A pencil section of a house on a slope with a sun-angle line drawn across it, the Adret lockup in the title block — The section starts from the sun: its angle is drawn first, across the house. The lockup sits in the title block like any other plotted line.

A square brushed brass plaque on limewashed plaster, engraved with the outlined Adret mark and filled with dark enamel — The outlined cut engraved in brass and filled with Ubac enamel, beside the studio door. The room is a frame and the patch stays solid.

A linen-bound book with the Adret square printed on its cover, a window’s patch of sunlight on the oak table beside it — The square on a linen cover, and beside it the thing it is drawn from: a window’s patch of light on the floor.

The Adret lockup in matte cut vinyl on a glass door, the low sun projecting its shadow onto the stone floor inside — Cut vinyl on the glass. In the morning the sun throws the lockup across the floor inside, patch and all.

Cards and letterhead

Letterpress business cards and a letterhead on board-marked concrete: two Lime cards, one Ubac card with the outlined mark, the letterhead with the lockup

Letterpress on thick cotton paper. On the Ubac card the square becomes a frame so the patch stays light, as the rule asks.

Pattern: a day of light

Rows of light parallelograms on Ubac, their lean turning from morning to evening across each row, one in Sunline

The patch alone, with no room around it. Across each row the sun crosses a day and the lean turns, by the mark’s own rule; each row is the next day. One noon patch in Sunline. As a device, a single patch sits under a word or in a picture’s corner.