The harmony between the unseen and the seen.

01

Essence

AUWA (あうわ) means the harmony between the unseen and the seen. Kokoro (心) is the Japanese concept that holds heart, mind, soul and spirit as one undivided whole, and the brand exists to make it visible: invisible emotion in the app, invisible craftsmanship in the store, invisible Kokoro in the stories.

The brand should feel like a quiet room in a Japanese temple at dusk. Dark, warm, still. Then light enters.

Everything in this document follows from that one image. When a decision is unclear, the test is whether it makes the room quieter or busier.

How to describe it

Three descriptors, each doing a different job at a different depth.

Never lead with "lifestyle brand" inside AUWA's own editorial voice, and never open with "Kokoro" in first-impression copy: it raises a question before it answers one.

What AUWA is not

Headspace-style illustration pop. Wellness pastels. Busy Japanese maximalism. Tech-startup energy. Anything with a gradient that screams app.

02

Logo

The wordmark is the logo. The letters A-U-W-A set in EB Garamond with wide tracking, no separate symbol, no icon, no monogram.

It works because A-U-W-A is naturally symmetrical, the two As bookending the U-W centre, and that symmetry echoes the etymology: あ (heavens) and わ (earth) framing う (connection). Serif letterforms carry craft, history and intention, which are the right signals for a philosophy brand.

Sumi on Surface

Washi on Yoru

Typeface

EB Garamond, regular

Case

All uppercase

Letter-spacing

0.25em

On light

Sumi

On dark

Washi

Header size

20px mobile / 22px desktop

Clear space

The height of the letter U on all sides

The orb animates. The wordmark stays still.

03

Typography

Two typefaces carry everything, with a third for Japanese text. The serif does the emotional work and the sans disappears into the background.

Getting the fonts

All three faces are open source under the SIL Open Font License, which means they travel with the brand: they are in the asset pack, they can be installed by anyone on the team, and they can be embedded in a product without a per-seat cost. That is deliberate. A brand that needs a licence negotiation before a new hire can open a file is a brand that gets rendered in Arial.

Install the desktop files from the asset pack. On the web, load them from the foundry rather than self-hosting unless you have a reason not to, and always declare the fallback stack so text stays readable while the face loads.

Scale

04

Colour

AUWA lives in darkness and the light comes from within, from the Kokoro being revealed. The default state is dark and quiet. Colour enters through gradients, glows and the emotional states.

The named colours

Four colours carry names because they appear together as the brand's warm-paper family, anchoring every surface across the site, the slides and the editorial moments where the brand needs to feel like an old book in lamplight rather than a digital interface.

Pairing discipline

The one rule that keeps every surface consistent.

• Never mix Sumi with Washi. They belong to different families.
• Never use pure #ffffff anywhere. Surface is the white.
• Never use Washi over photography. It blends into bright spots; Surface is the foreground over imagery.
• Never hardcode a hex. Consume the token, so changing one value moves every page, component and email.

Emotional states

Five gradient families, used in the app's Kokoro revelation screens and across social content. Each is a starting point for a three or four stop gradient.

Foundation scale

The cosmic scale belongs to the app and the social slides, where gradients need to emerge from a true near-black. Keep it separate from the website palette.

05

Motion

AUWA does not rush. Animations use ease-out-expo, fast departure and gentle arrival, like a breath out. Elements appear by fading and gently scaling, never by sliding in from an edge. The light shower is the hero animation and everything else supports it.

One tempo, not five. Every duration, stagger and easing comes from the locked set below, and a hardcoded millisecond value in a component is treated as drift.

For film and social, keep transitions slow and atmospheric, around half a second to a second. Never fast cuts, beat-synced transitions or zoom-punch effects.

06

Voice

Quiet authority. Precise observation. Short sentences that land, longer ones that breathe. The reference points are Kinfolk, Cereal and Monocle rather than any wellness or app brand.

Write in concrete, sensory detail rather than abstract claims. The blade coated in a thin film of camellia oil, not the blade was carefully preserved. Let the subject speak for itself and trust the reader to feel something without being told what.

Japanese terms are welcome, glossed briefly where they need it, and never exoticised.

07

Photography

Editorial and atmospheric. Natural light, real materials, real hands at work. Craft in progress rather than craft finished and staged.

Quiet compositions with room around the subject. If a frame feels busy it is the wrong frame. Avoid anything that reads as stock: arranged flat-lays, smiling models, saturated travel clichés, cherry blossom as shorthand for Japan.

08

Files

Everything below is yours. The Figma file is the source of truth for design, the asset pack is what production uses, and the markdown files carry the same decisions in a form your own AI tooling can read and your team can edit.

This page is built from brand.md. Edit the file and the page follows, which means the guidelines, the asset pack and whatever your team generates with AI all stay on the same source. There is no version of this document that can quietly go out of date while the file stays right.

@import url("https://moreair.co/brand/auwa/tokens.css");

.headline {
  color: var(--sumi);
  font-family: "EB Garamond", Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;
}