Identity

Fernscout — fern (German: far, distant) + scout.

The old name, Reisepost, described mail arriving: news from far away, landing at home. Fernscout describes the opposite direction of travel. A scout goes out ahead of you, covers ground you have not covered, and reports back. That is what the product actually is now: you write the trip in your own studio, and an agent of your own, or this instance's built-in assistant, is an optional second way to get words onto the page.

Say it as one word. Never FernScout, Fern Scout, or fern-scout, and never split the halves across two colours or two weights — the name is one thing, not a compound to be pulled apart.

Domain: fernscout.ch.

A Swiss Wanderweg waymark: the painted yellow lozenge that tells a hiker both that they are on the route and which way it runs.

Three elements, and each one means something:

Two of these are inherited verbatim from the Reisepost envelope mark — the bent route line and the green dot. The rebrand is a change of metaphor, not a break in visual lineage, and the navy rounded-square container (rx 21 at 96px) is unchanged so the icon drops into every existing slot without relayout.

Why this one

Three directions were drawn and rendered at a true 16×16 raster before the choice was made (alt-farsight.svg, alt-cairn.svg are kept alongside):

• farsight — a scout's lens, the land curving away inside it. The most explicitly agentic of the three, and the best of them at large sizes. At 16px it collapsed into a pale disc with every interior element below one pixel, and it reads as a generic "search" glyph.
• cairn — stacked stones, one per logged day. Structurally the truest metaphor. It survived 16px, but reads as a layers or database icon, and a mark that needs explaining is not doing its job.
• waymark — the only one whose silhouette is a single convex shape with no interior detail to lose. It is also the only one that is specifically Swiss, which a .ch product should not waste.

The lozenge was enlarged (half-diagonal 21 → 23 on the 96 grid) after the first render came back under-weight at favicon size. Re-test at 16px before changing its geometry again; do not eyeball it.

The iPhone app's icon and launch screens under ios/App/App/Assets.xcassets are derived the same way, by the same script (B2124), and are not listed above because they are not lockups.

The PNG is the one file here that is not a source. Some slots refuse SVG — a WhatsApp Business profile picture is the case that forced it — and they also crop to a circle, so it is flattened onto the plate's own navy rather than left transparent. The mark's extremities sit 44.9 units from centre against a 48 radius, so nothing is clipped by that crop.

Regenerate it — and the iPhone app's icon and launch screens, which the same script writes — with npm run avatar, in the same commit that changes the mark. It is a fourth copy of geometry that BRAND.md otherwise keeps in one place, it cannot be diffed, and it will not complain when it goes stale — which is exactly how a logo update ships everywhere except the avatar nobody thought to re-export.

Clear space: one lozenge half-diagonal (23 units at 96 scale) on all four sides. Nothing enters it, including page edges.

Minimum sizes: mark 16px. Full lockup 120px wide — below that the wordmark counter shapes fill in and you should switch to the mark alone.

Never: recolour the lozenge; straighten the trail; separate the dot from the trail's leading end; add a gradient, bevel or shadow; set the wordmark in anything but Fredoka; place the cream trail on a ground lighter than navy-700.

Outline the wordmark text before sending any of these files outside the repo. Fredoka is not installed on a stranger's machine, and the SVGs fall back to Trebuchet MS, which is not the brand.

• Display / wordmark — Fredoka 700. Rounded and warm; it kept the product from reading as a dashboard under the old name and it still does.
• Body — Plus Jakarta Sans.

Fredoka is used with restraint: the wordmark, page titles, and the big numbers on the overview. It is not a UI font — buttons, labels and body copy are Jakarta.

Fredoka was chosen for a friendlier, postcard-ish brand. Fernscout is a little more purposeful, and a narrower, more technical display face is a legitimate future question — but changing it is a site redesign, and is deliberately out of scope for the rebrand.

So later icons look related rather than merely adjacent:

• 24px grid, 2px strokes, round caps and joins — the trail in the logo is the reference stroke.
• Geometric, not illustrative. No outlines around filled shapes except where the mark itself does it, for separation on navy.
• Yellow marks a place or a state. Green marks something live or ahead. Navy is structure. Do not use green and yellow decoratively; in this system they carry meaning.

path-pulse in app/globals.css is defined but not wired to anything yet — its glow is yellow (rgba(255, 210, 63, …)), not the green the leading dot is supposed to breathe in. Fix the colour before using it anywhere. Until then, everything animates on interaction only, and all of it respects prefers-reduced-motion.

Plain, specific, unhurried. The product tells someone where they went and what it cost; it does not sell them the trip back to themselves.

• Say what happened: "Bus to Hoi An, 4h 20m." Not "An unforgettable journey."
• Sentence case everywhere, including buttons.
• German and English both read naturally — the name is half of each, and so is the audience. Avoid idiom that only survives in one.

The code is Apache-2.0. The name and the drawings are outside that licence — see BRAND-LICENSE for exactly which files, and TRADEMARK.md for the policy. Forks are welcome and must rebrand: unregistered word mark Fernscout™ and the waymark device, no implication of endorsement.

Every asset in this folder carries a copyright notice inside the file, the PNG in its metadata. Keep it there when you edit one — it is the only claim that travels with a copy that has left the repository. B657.