Motive & Method
Work with me

Brand guidelines

A quiet system for saying serious things.

How Motive & Method looks, sounds and behaves — from a single line of copy to a pitch deck. The system is deliberately small. It should make decisions easier, not become another thing to manage.

Version 1.0November 2026Toronto

01 — The idea

Marketing, understood.

The name carries the whole argument. Motive is why people act. Method is how we earn that action honestly.

Motive & Method is an independent marketing practice for people who would rather earn attention than buy it.

The brand should feel like a well-edited notebook: considered, specific, warm and unafraid of a point of view. It is not a growth agency, a content farm or a platform. It is a place to think clearly about a commercial problem and then act on that thinking.

Promise: clarity about the person, the choice and the promise. Method: make the thinking visible, useful and honest. Manner: direct without being cold; literary without being precious.

The three notes

Motive. Method. Manner.

Every page, deck and email should carry all three. If one is missing, the work will feel either clever, mechanical or merely pleasant.

01

Motive

Start with the person and the decision they are trying to make. Curiosity before persuasion.

02

Method

Make the thinking visible, sequenced and usable. No mystique around the work.

03

Manner

Stay precise, candid and human. Respect the reader’s intelligence and their time.

02 — The mark

Two circles, one conversation.

Motive and method overlap. So do the brand and the person it serves. The overlap is the work.

Motive & Method

Use it this way

  • Keep the wordmark as live type or a clean vector. Do not retrace it.
  • Use the ampersand in oxblood when colour is available.
  • Give the mark clear space equal to the height of the ampersand on every side.
  • Minimum sizes: 24 px for the symbol, 120 px wide for the wordmark.

Do not

  • Stretch, rotate, outline or add a shadow.
  • Place it over busy photography or a low-contrast background.
  • Use a different ampersand or set the name in all caps.
  • Add a tagline lockup, badge, swoosh or icon set.
Motive & Method Inverse lockup on ink or photography

03 — Colour

Oxblood and parchment, with room to breathe.

The palette is warm, literary and deliberately restrained. Ink does the reading. Oxblood does the pointing. Parchment keeps the page from feeling clinical.

Ink

Ink

#191512

Body text, headlines on paper

Parchment

Parchment

#F5F1E9

Primary page background

Paper

Paper

#FAF7F1

Cards, panels, quiet contrast

Oxblood

Oxblood

#7B2D26

Accent, links, the ampersand

Clay

Clay

#A3463A

Hover, secondary emphasis

Warm grey

Warm grey

#6A6158

Secondary copy, captions

Rule

Rule

#DDD4C6

Hairlines and dividers

Rose

Rose

#E0907F

Accent in dark mode only

Use the 60/30/10 ratio

Roughly 60% parchment or ink, 30% paper or warm grey, 10% oxblood. If the accent starts to feel like a brand colour rather than a pointer, there is too much of it.

Dark mode is a translation, not a second brand

Night is #12100E, charcoal is #1B1815, bone is #F3EEE6 and the accent lifts to rose #E0907F. Keep the same hierarchy and the same restraint.

Contrast is part of the voice

Ink on parchment is 16.1:1. Warm grey on parchment is 5.4:1. Oxblood on parchment is 8.3:1. Body copy should stay at 4.5:1 or better in both themes.

Alternative directions

Three palettes worth considering.

Keep the current oxblood unless there is a reason to change. If you want a different temperature, choose one direction and apply it consistently — do not mix accent families.

Marketing, understood. A calmer way to be taken seriously.

Deep teal & chalk

Analytical, contemporary, quietly confident. Good if the work is moving toward research, product marketing or data-heavy advisory.

Background
#F4F3EE
Ink
#14201F
Accent
#145C5A
Contrast
7.0:1
Marketing, understood. Experience, without the theatre.

Ink navy & sand

Institutional, precise, premium. A good fit for financial services, B2B and board-level advisory. It reads older and more formal than oxblood.

Background
#F5F0E6
Ink
#14171C
Accent
#1F3A5F
Contrast
10.1:1
Marketing, understood. Grounded enough to disagree well.

Forest & oat

Human, patient, a little more pastoral. It suits brand-building, purpose-led work and longer relationships. Warmer than teal, less formal than navy.

Background
#F4F1E7
Ink
#171C18
Accent
#2F5D46
Contrast
6.7:1

Recommendation: keep oxblood & parchment as the primary identity. It is the most distinctive of the four and the most suited to an editorial practice. Use navy for formal proposals, teal for analytical work and forest for long-term brand programmes — as campaign accents, not as a second website palette.

04 — Typography

A serif with a point of view. A sans that gets out of the way.

Fraunces carries the argument. Inter carries the evidence. Use two weights, not five.

Display — Fraunces

Clear thinking,
plainly said.

Weights 300–600. Tight tracking at large sizes. Use for headlines, pull quotes and the wordmark. Never for long body copy.

Body — Inter

The work begins with a question, not a deliverable.

Weights 400, 500 and 600. Body 16–20 px, line-height 1.55–1.7. Use 600 for emphasis, not for decoration.

Display
48–96 px, line-height 0.98–1.1, tracking −0.02 to −0.04 em
Heading
28–40 px, line-height 1.1–1.25
Body
16–20 px, line-height 1.55–1.7
Label
11–13 px, uppercase, tracking 0.12–0.18 em

PowerPoint uses Georgia and Arial as cross-platform stand-ins so the file opens correctly on any machine. Install Fraunces and Inter for an exact match.

05 — Layout & image

Space is the most expensive material.

The layout should feel edited, not filled. One idea per screen, one clear hierarchy, and enough quiet for the idea to land.

Grid

Twelve columns on a 1,180 px container. Page margins of 24–48 px. Align to the text column, not to the browser edge. Narrow measures for prose: 60–68 characters.

Space

Use a 4 px base scale: 4, 8, 12, 16, 24, 32, 48, 64, 96. Section spacing should breathe. Thin 1 px rules do the dividing; heavy boxes do not.

Image

Documentary, natural light, real places. Photographs of work, streets, desks, hands and weather. No stock handshakes, no blue gradient technology, no posed laughter.

Motion

Short, quiet transitions of 200–300 ms. A slight lift, never a bounce. Respect prefers-reduced-motion and never make animation the only way to understand something.

Accessibility

AA contrast in both themes, visible focus rings, 44 px targets where possible, meaningful link text, and no colour-only meaning. A brand that is hard to use is not elegant.

06 — Voice

Calm, precise, lightly literary.

Write as if the reader is intelligent, busy and slightly sceptical. That is the reader.

Short sentences. Concrete verbs. British spelling. No hype, no growth-bro jargon, no false urgency.

Say the difficult thing plainly and then say what you would do about it. Warmth is not the same as chumminess. Confidence is not the same as certainty.

Say

  • “The story is unclear, so every channel has to work harder.”
  • “Here is the trade-off, and here is what I would choose.”
  • “We can test that.”

Avoid

  • “Unlock explosive growth.”
  • “Game-changing, world-class solutions.”
  • “As you know, in today’s fast-paced landscape…”
Spelling
British English: organise, behaviour, programme, colour
Currency
Canadian dollars, written C$2,500 or CAD $2,500
Numbers
Spell out one to nine; use figures from 10. Use % and C$ in tables.
Punctuation
Oxford comma when it helps. One exclamation mark a year, if that.

07 — Presentations

The deck is a room, not a document.

Sixteen by nine. One idea per slide. A clear argument, not a tour of the file system.

Download the pitch deck

PowerPoint template · 14 slides · 16:9 · editable placeholders · CAD pricing

Slide sequence

  1. Cover
  2. Section divider — the case
  3. The conversation
  4. What it costs
  5. Section divider — the shift
  6. The shift
  7. The approach
  8. The work
  9. How it runs
  10. What good looks like
  11. The plan
  12. Investment
  13. Section divider — the decision
  14. Next step

Rules of the room

  • One argument per slide. If it needs a second title, it is two slides.
  • Titles are sentences. Body copy supports them; it does not repeat them.
  • No more than 40 words of body copy on a slide.
  • Use dark slides for a change of register, not for decoration.
  • Charts use oxblood, warm grey and rule. Label directly; avoid legends where possible.
  • Replace every bracket with a real, sourced, permissioned claim.

Deck palette

  • Ink
  • Parchment
  • Oxblood
  • Warm grey
  • Rose

Georgia for display, Arial for body. Use Fraunces and Inter if the audience has the brand fonts installed.

08 — Keeping it consistent

A small system, held with a light hand.

The website is the source of truth for colour, type and spacing. The pitch deck is the source of truth for presentation structure. This page records the reasoning behind both.

Before publishing anything new, check four things: does it carry a clear motive, is the method visible, is the manner human, and would it still feel right in a printed notebook?

Version 1.0. Review after any change to the core palette, the typefaces or the service offer.