Living Guidelines
Build the brand like a literary domestic system, not a produce novelty shop.
Vegetable Verses should feel authored, useful, emotionally charged, and a little hard to place.
Do not flatten it
Keep the book central
Positioning
Queer literary object + downtown uniform + ceremonial kitchenware.
Not poetry merch. Not vegetablecore. Not generic lifestyle language with a tomato on top.
Write like an authored object, not a lifestyle template.
Prefer procedure, evidence, handling, utility, and tenderness over farmstand nostalgia.
Let humor arrive dry, intimate, and slightly overqualified.
If an item only lands as cute, cut it.
Palette
Saturated, edible, stained, lush.
More brine and tarnish than cartoon produce brightness.
Aubergine
#34192f
Hero serif, dark fields, night-framed panels.
Brine
#6a7d38
Utility accents, category chips, specimen tabs.
Tomato
#b63f34
Warnings, emphasis, charged moments.
Butter
#cfb35f
Warm highlight, tags, foil-like details.
Cream
#f4ead8
Paper ground, packaging, interior breathing room.
Soil
#6c4630
Material weight, domestic base tones.
Fog
#c8c2b7
Secondary surfaces, subtle restraint.
Steel
#7f8686
Hardware, utility frames, tarnished accents.
Type System
One literary serif, one utilitarian grotesk, one utility line.
The serif carries authorship. The sans carries objects. The mono carries handling language.
Literary Serif
Cormorant Garamond
Vegetable Verses
Campaign headlines, titles, launch statements, poems at large scale.
Utilitarian Grotesk
Instrument Sans
Objects, uniforms, and domestic equipment.
Body copy, product cards, navigation, size and material notes.
Utility Mono
IBM Plex Mono
PROCEED WITH CLEAN HANDS OR DON’T
SKUs, evidence tags, chips, packaging slips, procedural callouts.
Motifs
- Specimen tags and evidence labels
- Produce-crate stamps and archival underlines
- Checkboxes, ruling lines, and legal annotations
- Botanical drawings that feel helpful and incriminating
- Order slips, instruction cards, and deli-paper wraps
Materials
- Washed cotton
- Garment-dyed jersey
- Canvas
- Linen
- Enamel
- Glazed ceramic
- Brushed steel
- Oiled wood
Product Test
Each item should satisfy at least two of these.
- beautiful
- useful
- funny
- a little dangerous
- quotable
- emotionally charged
- giftable
- collectible
Copy Bands
Band A belongs on product. Band B belongs on packaging and cards. Band C stays in the book.
- The facts and the ruling don’t agree.
- Compliance is not permission.
- Love is a soft protocol.