Brand sheet · v2 · 6 Oct 2026
Common Chord sells a different thing to a different buyer — an orchestra is not a healing client — so it keeps its own mark, its own type and its own voice. It does not need to look like a stranger. The type, the layout and the ribbon run right across the three rooms, so a visitor feels one person behind all of it.
Three strings and a note — a chord, held in a rounded square. It reads at 16px as a favicon and at two metres as signage.
Primary — tile field, white mark
Reversed — white field, ink mark
On panel — ink field, white mark
Seven values carry the structure, and there are no others. The green ground, the brass accent and the three room colours — violet, brass and amber — are retired. Nothing on a Common Chord surface is a shade of a token either: if something is too light to read, the surface changes, not the colour.
Six more values, and these are Dave's own — sampled from his
film (/img/brand-poster.jpg), quantised and counted by area. The film is an
indigo-to-periwinkle field: there is no red, green or yellow in it at all, which is why it reads as depth
rather than as rainbow. They appear on edges only — the frame around the film, the
top of a card, the outline of a button, the underline of a form field, the rule above the footer. No
surface is ever filled with them and no text is ever set in them.
Two colour moments, one loud and one quiet. The loud one is the ribbon: a full spectrum of light, drawn once per page and never more than once. “It awakens an enlightened spectrum of colour when you see it.” The quiet one is the film palette, which you only notice at the edges. Everything else — headings, rules, labels, tables, buttons — is ink, panel or hairline.
Headlines and the wordmark. Tracking −0.03em on display sizes; uppercase and letter-spaced for labels.
Headings · labels · buttons
Body copy, captions, tables. Plain and legible, no posture. Sentences short.
Body · UI · reports
Reserved for the three room-door names and nothing else. It is the shelf the rooms stand on.
Room-door names only
Lead with the plan, not the poetry. Say what happens, in what order, and what it costs.
You played in this world. Talk like someone who has carried the instrument, not someone who has read about it.
No claims without numbers. “Nothing to show yet” is a complete answer, and better than a padded one.
White or panel ground. Ink for type and rules. Hairlines to divide. The ribbon once, where the eye lands first. The film palette on edges, never on a surface. Give the mark clear space equal to the height of the note.
Don't bring back the green, the brass or the room colours. Don't fill anything with the film palette — it lives on edges. Don't invent a colour: if it is not in the two sets above, it is not ours. Don't stretch or rotate the mark. Don't tint a token to fix contrast.
Mark left, wordmark right, “A David Williams studio” underneath in small caps. If Common Chord ever moves to its own domain, this lockup travels unchanged.