Brand Guidelines
Vol. 01 · 2026
Graphic Press · Estevan, Saskatchewan
Graphic Press sets its own type, mixes its own ink and cuts its own stock. The brand should look like a shop that does all three. This book fixes the parts that must not drift — the mark, the black, the white, Oswald and the slogan — and leaves room in the parts that should stay alive.
A trade shop with a
modern front counter
The brand carries two things at once. Heritage, because the craft is old, the vocabulary is old, and the trust is earned in ink. Currency, because the work is bought today by people comparing quotes on a phone.
The system resolves that by keeping the structure contemporary — flush-left grids, hard rules, generous white space, no ornament for its own sake — and the furniture historical: registration targets, crop marks, thick-thin rules, roller texture. Modern layout, pressroom detail.
- Built for volume
- Long runs, repeat runs and multi-item campaigns, scheduled against the launch date your team is working to.
- Made in house
- Design, prepress, press and bindery under one roof in Estevan. Fewer handoffs, tighter proofing.
- One point of contact
- An account contact who holds your brand standards, your stocks and your run history, from quote to delivery.
Reversed on Press Black
The script is the brand. It is a drawn wordmark, not type — never re-set it, never substitute a script font for it. White script on Press Black is the default; everything else is an exception.
The black-on-stock cut is for anything printed one colour, embroidered, foil-stamped or etched. The third cut is for packaging and anything printed on brown kraft board — the material the shop already runs on, printed black only.
The script is never set in the accent. The accent belongs to the slogan, not to the mark.
- Clear space
- X on all four sides, where X is the cap height of the G. Nothing enters it.
- Print minimum
- 25 mm wide. Below that the swash closes up on uncoated stock — use the seal.
- Screen minimum
- 120 px wide.
- Embroidery
- 45 mm, using the seal rather than the script.
- ✕Do not stretch or condense it.
- ✕Do not rotate, arc or angle it.
- ✕Do not tint, screen back or halftone it.
- ✕Do not add a shadow, outline or bevel.
- ✕Do not recolour the script — it is never set in the accent.
- ✕Do not box or badge it.
- ✕Do not crowd the clear space.
- ✕Do not retype it in another face and call it the logo.
Where the work is made
Two secondary marks. They exist to say where a job was made, and they are the reason a customer down the street can tell the difference between this shop and a web-to-print portal in another country.
Use them small, quietly, and often. They belong at the foot of a piece, on the back of a card, on the tape and the carton — anywhere a sign-off belongs. They are not a logo and they never sit where the script does.
- Width
- 120–160 px on screen, 30–40 mm in print
- Colour
- Type takes the ground — white on black, ink on paper
- Emblem
- The leaf stays red and the wheat stays gold, at any size
- Placement
- A sign-off. Never in the mark's clear space, never a headline
Reversed on Press Black / Ink on Stock White
The red of the leaf and the gold of the wheat are the only colours in this system outside the four on the previous page. That is on purpose: a jurisdiction mark is not a palette decision, in the same way a payment-card logo in a footer is not. Nothing else borrows them.
- Hex
- #000000
- Pantone
- PANTONE Black C
- CMYK
- 60 / 50 / 40 / 100
- RGB
- 0 0 0
Fields, type, the mark. Rich build for large solids; 100K alone for small type and one-colour jobs.
- Hex
- #FFFFFF
- Pantone
- —
- CMYK
- 0 / 0 / 0 / 0
- RGB
- 255 255 255
The page, and the ink when the page is black. Most of what is not black is this.
- Hex
- #F9423A
- Pantone
- PANTONE Warm Red C
- CMYK
- 0 / 74 / 77 / 2
- RGB
- 249 66 58
The swapped word in the slogan, and small emphasis. Roughly one element per piece.
- Hex
- #6E6B68
- Pantone
- PANTONE Warm Gray 9 C
- CMYK
- 48 / 44 / 47 / 9
- RGB
- 110 107 104
Captions, secondary labels, hairlines. Never for headlines and never as a tint of the mark.
- 70 Black
- 20 White
- 10 Warm Red
Black stays
Black is the printer's default ink, the cheapest and the most exacting. A true #000 rather than a soft charcoal makes the position sharper — the shop that runs the densest black in town should not be printing itself in grey.
White does the rest
Not a tinted white, not a warm one. The brand is mostly black and white, and the moment the white picks up a cast it stops reading as paper and starts reading as a colour somebody chose. Black and white are the two that carry the work; the accent is the exception, not the field.
One accent, and it is Warm Red
A single accent, spent on about one element a piece. It is the exception, not the field — black and white carry the work, and a colour that turns up everywhere stops being an accent. Warm Red is not a new choice: it is the Pantone this shop has numbered its carbon forms in for more than forty years. Every duplicate book that has gone out the door carries it, which makes it the one colour the brand can claim by use rather than by preference.
- Rich black
- Solids over 50 mm: 60C 50M 40Y 100K. Text and rules: 100K only.
- Warm Red
- PANTONE Warm Red C for a spot job — the ink the shop already numbers carbon forms in. The CMYK beside it is a straight conversion of the hex, not Pantone's four-colour build; confirm any process substitute on a wet proof.
- On kraft board
- Print black only. The accent muddies on brown board; let the board be the accent.
- Foil
- Matte black foil or antique brass. No gloss gold.
- Digital
- sRGB values above, and they are a rendition of a spot ink rather than a match. Type set ON the accent is black, not white — white over it is 3.6:1. The accent clears 4.5:1 on both white and black, so the house rule that small type on a dark field takes white is now a stylistic one, not a legibility one.
Pantone references are closest-match targets.
Confirm against a wet proof before any brand run.
NOPQRSTUVWXYZ
1234567890 &?!#%/
Oswald, all caps, tracking 0. Never letterspaced, never condensed further, never in sentence case. The face is already narrow; adding space to it breaks the wordshape and makes it read as a default rather than a decision.
If a line needs air, the answer is not tracking — it is the mono. Set the airy tracked line in JetBrains Mono and let Oswald stay tight.
- 300 Light — deck subheads
- 400 Regular — decks, labels
- 500 Medium — subheads
- 600 Semibold — headlines
- 700 Bold — posters only
- Case
- Uppercase only
- Tracking
- 0 — never adjust
- Leading
- 0.92–1.0 of size
- Alignment
- Flush left, ragged right
- Minimum size
- 16 px / 11 pt
- Maximum lines
- 3 in a headline
- Widows
- Break by hand, not by hyphen
A humanist grotesque with open apertures and a slightly narrow set. It holds long paragraphs at 9 pt on uncoated stock, and its warmth keeps the black-heavy palette from turning clinical. It also sits under Oswald without arguing: different proportions, same era of construction.
Fallback stack: Work Sans, Helvetica Neue, Arial, sans-serif.
The spec-sheet voice: job numbers, stock names, dimensions, captions, tracked micro-labels, callouts on packaging. It carries every letterspaced line in the system so Oswald never has to. Use it small — 7 to 10 pt — and always tracked.
Job #4412 · 80lb cover · 4/4 + spot
short deadlines
Body copy sets in Work Sans at 1.6 line height, flush left, ragged right. Never justify — the rag is part of the modern half of the brand. Measure stays between 45 and 70 characters.
Caption · Mono 9.5/.12em
- ●Do: Oswald for every headline, subhead and label set in caps.
- ●Do: Work Sans for anything longer than one line of reading.
- ●Do: JetBrains Mono for every tracked or technical line.
- ✕Do not: Never letterspace Oswald, at any size.
- ✕Do not: Never set body copy in Oswald — it is a display face.
- ✕Do not: Never introduce a fourth typeface, including a script.
- ✕Do not: Never justify text or centre a paragraph.
paper
look good
One word changes; the rest of the line never does. The swapped word carries the accent, and it is the only accent-coloured element on the piece — everything around it is black or white. It stays the accent on either ground: at this size the colour holds on black, which smaller type in the same red would not.
- ●Do: Swap only the noun. “We make” and “look good” never change.
- ●Do: Keep the swapped word the same weight as the rest of the line.
- ●Do: Match the swap to the piece: the word on a box says packaging, the word on a card says business cards.
- ●Do: The swapped word takes the accent on white, and on black too — it is display type, big enough to carry it.
- ✕Do not: Never swap in a client name, a season, or a joke.
- ✕Do not: Never colour any other word in the line.
- ✕Do not: Never lock the slogan to the script mark as one artwork — they are set separately.
Six devices borrowed from the pressroom. They carry the personality so the logo does not have to, and they are the only decoration this brand uses.
They are furniture, not ornament: they sit at edges, in corners and between sections, and they do not fill space. One family per piece — a page that uses the rule pair does not also need the dot screen.
The rule pair
A 2 pt black rule with a short accent bar under its left end. Opens a section, one per page.
Crop marks
Hairline corner marks framing a photo or a coupon. Printer's furniture, used sparingly.
Dot screen
A coarse halftone dot at 20 to 30 percent. Fills a panel or a page edge. Black only.
Stamp blocks
A 2 pt box around two lines of Oswald. Two facts only, never a slogan.
Locally
The local mark
Hash in the accent, words in white or black. Signs off a piece; it is not a headline.
Accent numerals
Two-digit Oswald numerals for steps, sections and specs. Set in the accent.
- Press Black
- #000000 · Black C
- Stock White
- #FFFFFF
- Warm Red
- #F9423A · Warm Red C
- Proof Grey
- #6E6B68
- Ratio
- 70 / 20 / 10
- Headline
- Oswald 600 caps, tracking 0
- Subhead
- Oswald 400/500 caps
- Body
- Work Sans 400, 1.6
- Detail
- JetBrains Mono, tracked
- Align
- Flush left always
- Never
- Letterspaced Oswald
- Primary mark
- White script on black
- Clear space
- X = cap height of the G
- Print minimum
- 25 mm wide
- Accent
- Warm Red, about one element a piece
- Small type on black
- White, never the accent
- Review
- Annually, or on any press change
look good