tenti.ai brand guidelines
How Tenti looks, sounds, and speaks. One reference for product, packaging, app, and web.
v0.1 · working draft · august 202601Essence
Tenti is a screen-free word game: children snap picture boxes onto the base box where Tenti the pup lives, and he weaves them into spoken stories and songs that grow vocabulary, with a playful sprinkle of other languages. Everything the brand does follows three words, warm, calm, alive. Warm because it lives where children play. Calm because we never overstimulate, one thing at a time, real pauses, soft light. Alive because the toy answers every touch instantly. If a design decision makes Tenti louder, busier, or colder, it's the wrong decision.
02Wordmark & mark
The brand is the pup plus the lowercase wordmark. They may appear together or alone; the pup alone is the app icon and the favicon.
tenti.ai
wordmark: Fredoka SemiBold, always lowercase · ".ai" in coral at SemiBold · clearspace: the height of the "t" on all sides · minimum size: 24px wordmark height on screen, 8mm in print. On packaging aimed at children, "tenti" may appear without ".ai".
Do
Keep it lowercase, always. The brand whispers, it doesn't shout.
Use ink on light grounds and cream on dark grounds.
Let the pup face the wordmark or the reader.
Don't
Don't set it in another typeface, add effects, or outline it.
Don't colour the wordmark in pack colours, those belong to the boxes.
Don't stretch, rotate, or crop the pup. He is never a background texture.
03Tenti the pup
Tenti is a small, friendly dog who lives inside the base box and teaches through play. He is built from about a dozen simple rounded shapes, so the same character survives print, embroidery, moulding, and a low-resolution display without redrawing.
Construction
Round head, floppy drop ears, oversized eyes with a large and a small catchlight, patch over the right eye, cream muzzle, open smile with tongue, blush cheeks, three-bump tuft, tennis-green collar with a gold tag. Everything is a circle, an ellipse, or a rounded rectangle, with no points, no angles, ever.
Personality
Tenti greets, wonders, and celebrates. He never scolds, never says "no" or "wrong," never rushes. A wrong answer is met by warmly naming what the child did find, then asking again. His catchphrase is a soft "Wuf!", one syllable, always an exclamation of delight, never a bark of alarm.
The voice
Tenti speaks with a warm young female voice, a kind big sister reading aloud. British English, light and bright but soft, naturally smiley, an unhurried playtime pace that can soften for bedtime. Playful without being squeaky, cosy without being sleepy, no presenter polish. One voice everywhere the product speaks (toy, app, ads), and the full casting brief lives in the audio manifest.
Expressions map to session states
Happy (default) · Singing (song mode, eyes closed, note above head) · Surprised (side adventures, ears up) · Sleepy (wind-down endings, heavy lids) · Listening (waiting for a box to be connected, head tilted). Commission all five as a set; never invent new emotional states without adding them here.
04Colour
Paper and ink carry the brand; pine brings it alive; pack accents belong to the boxes and to nothing else. Values below are the light theme, and the dark theme (bedtime mode) has matched tokens.
Surfaces
Ink
Brand
Pack accents
Washes · full-bleed section patches
Do
Keep pages mostly cream and ink; pine is for the one thing that matters most on the surface.
Give every new expansion pack its own colour from the same family, soft, warm, never neon.
Check every ink/ground pair at WCAG AA for body text.
Don't
Don't use pack colours decoratively. A coral heading means "starter pack," so a coral heading about shipping is a lie.
Don't add gradients except the gentle top gloss on physical-box illustrations.
Don't use pure black or pure white anywhere.
05Typography
Three faces, three jobs. Fredoka is the voice of the brand; Nunito does the reading; JetBrains Mono handles data, specs, and anything a developer touches.
The rules, headings sentence-case, never all-caps except small mono labels with letter-spacing. Body text stays near 65 characters per line. Fredoka is never used for paragraphs, and Nunito is never used for the wordmark. Fallbacks, Fredoka → system rounded sans; Nunito → system UI sans; JetBrains Mono → monospace.
06Voice & tone
Two voices, one warmth. Tenti speaks to children: short, musical, one idea at a time, repetitive on purpose, the same loop shape every round with only the content changing, so the child always knows what happens next. The brand speaks to parents: plain, honest, technical when it earns trust. We say "playful exposure to languages" and "growing vocabulary", never "your child will learn French," never "revolutionary AI."
07Sound identity
Sound is half the product. Every sound is pregenerated, mixed soft, and never startles. The snap is the signature, three layers, always in this order, landing within 300 ms of the magnet seating.
The principles, everything through one gentle compressor so overlaps glue instead of clip; no sound above a conversational level; silence is part of the design, pauses are marked, not filled.
08Light language
Light means one thing, story progress. Each box has a single top light bar in its pack colour, just under the picture. It fills while that box's chapter is told, stays full when the chapter is done, and goes dark on pause or restart. The base box ring breathes softly while a session is playing. Nothing else lights up, blinks, or animates. An idle Tenti is a dark, quiet Tenti.
09The short list of nevers
Never sharp shapes, loud sounds, or flashing lights. Never "no," "wrong," or time pressure in Tenti's mouth. Never a claim of fluency, and never the word "screen" for the light bar, because it isn't one. Never a menu, a login, or a setting in front of a child. Never audio leaving the box, and never a marketing sentence that couldn't be read aloud, comfortably, at bedtime.