A reference for everything visible: colors, type, voice, components. Open this before making anything for Knit.
Small loops of yarn, one stitch at a time, become something whole. That's the spine of every choice — color, type, copy, photo. Anything that breaks the metaphor doesn't ship.
The system reads like a paperback novel, not a SaaS dashboard. Cream surface, ink near-black, real warm browns. No pure white. No cool grey.
The voice is a person who actually built this — talking to a friend over coffee. Specific impact, plain words, italics on the emotional ones.
Knit is about compounding small things, so the brand reads slow. Generous spacing. Long-form display serif. No urgency badges, no countdown timers.
"Today, your roundups built half a school well in Malawi."— the bar, set by Charity: Water in 2009. Knit's bar too.
Slick doesn't compound. Specific does. Acorns and Charity: Water didn't win on production value — they won on actual numbers, real causes, named outcomes.
"47¢ became 1.4 meals at the South Side food bank." Specific cause, specific outcome, real numbers from Charityvest's reporting. Never invented.
"You built this," not "we built this." Knit is the conduit, not the hero. Every win belongs to the donor.
A dime, a quarter, a nickel. The whole product is the smallness. Never zoom out and lose it. Coins first, totals last.
No "millions go hungry while you scroll." Donors burn out on guilt and unsubscribe. The job is to make giving feel light, not heavy.
Disrupting, revolutionary, 1%-er, unlocking giving — banned. Also banned: delight, frictionless, seamless, experience (as a noun), platform, ecosystem.
No stock footage of children's hands receiving water. No tearful music. Knit is the opposite of that energy. Real receipts, real coffee, real spare change.
The palette is anti-fintech. No kelly green, no electric purple gradients. The greens are quiet — closer to a moss or a dry pine. Amber and clay handle moments of emphasis. Use accents sparingly; the page is the product.
Newsreader is a reading-typeface — it has the shape of a paperback novel rather than a magazine cover. Inter is the workhorse for UI and body. The italics aren't decoration; they're where the meaning lives.
A 4-pt grid, but the page should feel airy. Default to one step larger than feels right.
Buttons sit on actual transaction cards. Form fields appear in the actual waitlist signup. The brand only matters in the surfaces it ships in.
The product is small things, so show small things — in soft natural light. The opposite of stock photography. The opposite of flat illustration. If you can't shoot it on a phone, it shouldn't be on the page.
The mark is one continuous line — a thread that loops back on itself. Read literally: a stylized "K." Read structurally: the metaphor itself. Two anchor knots in the institutional green sit at the start and end of the stroke, marking where the thread enters and leaves the page.
A few real-shape surfaces, written in voice. Use these as templates before drafting anything new.