OneTruck — product brand

The operator-facing product brand for the platform DPW (and future tenants) run their business on. Register: working-class premium — Carhartt / Milwaukee / CAT. Made unmistakably for people who work with their hands, executed with the precision of something expensive. This software computes paychecks and legal quote acceptance; it can't look folksy-flimsy, and it must never read as corporate SaaS. The design scene: asphalt at dawn under a sodium work-light — cold steel, machined to tolerance, one hazard stripe.

Colorway: safety amber on steel (decided by bake-off — see below).

Scope boundary (do not violate)

This brand skins the operator-facing shell ONLY: login, app header/nav, PWA icon, the OneTruck marketing site, and a "Powered by OneTruck" statement footer. Tenant brands own every customer-facing surface — quotes, invoices, texts, the customer website carry the operator's name, never OneTruck. It's a core sales promise: "your name on everything your customers see." shell.html shows OneTruck's steel chrome framing the DPW tenant as a small workspace chip; statement.html is issued by the tenant (Dalton Pressure Washing) with OneTruck credited only in the footer.

Files

The colorway decision (bake-off)

Three colorways were rendered in the money-surface shell context with the stress cases that matter — a Pay-month money table, the primary button next to a Void payment danger button, both tenant chips (DPW orange, Summit green) in the chrome, and the mark at 16/24/32px on dark and white — and judged in this order (bakeoff.html):

  1. (a) semantic safety — the primary action must never share a hue family with danger.
  2. (b) tenant-boundary clarity — chrome must not blur into a tenant hue.
  3. (c) competitive distinctness vs Jobber teal / Housecall blue / QuoteIQ navy.
  4. (d) small-size legibility.
Colorway a b c d Verdict
Amber #F4BE0F (h96) WINNER
Red #C8202F (h27) out — primary red is danger red; "Close month" and "Void payment" read identical
Ember #E4622C (h42) ⚠️ out — ember ≈ DPW orange (h55); the chrome accent and the DPW tenant dot bleed together

Amber wins on the two non-negotiables (a + b). Its hue (96°) sits 70°+ from danger red, so a destructive button can never mimic the primary; and it's clear of both tenant hues (DPW orange 55°, Summit green 150°), so the chrome frames tenants without blurring. Red is a beautiful Milwaukee/Georgia combo but fails (a) categorically — you cannot color a destructive action the same as the safe one on a screen that closes months and voids payments. Ember fails (b) — it is essentially DPW's orange, which collapses the product/tenant boundary the whole brand is built on. (c) and (d) are satisfied by all three and never get to vote. Amber's only soft spot is (d) on white; the dark "1" + a hardened badge border (stroke-opacity 0.20) carry it — verified at 16/24/32px on both grounds.

Palette (OKLCH — tokens in onetruck.css)

Cool asphalt/steel darks so the chrome frames any tenant hue, one hi-vis amber accent, tan for warmth.

Role Token OKLCH ~hex
Asphalt (bg) --ot-bg 0.170 0.008 245 #14171B
Steel panel --ot-surface 0.215 0.010 245 #1D2127
Machined line --ot-line 0.340 0.012 245 #363C44
Ink --ot-ink 0.970 0.004 250 #F3F5F7
Ink dim (body) --ot-ink-dim 0.800 0.006 250 #BEC4CC
Muted (labels) --ot-muted 0.660 0.010 245 #8A929C
Accent — safety amber --ot-hi 0.858 0.170 96 #F4BE0F
On-accent text --ot-on-hi 0.170 0.010 250 #16191E
Work-glove tan --ot-tan 0.800 0.050 74 #D2BC9C

Accent discipline: amber is the brand color — used only on the mark, the one primary action, focus rings, the active-nav indicator, and the single hazard stripe. Everything else is steel + ink. Warning is a tinted chip, never a solid fill, so it can't be mistaken for the solid-amber primary. Overusing the yellow is the fast path to "cheap"; restraint is what reads premium.

Contrast — WCAG AA (audited, all pass)

Every token pair actually used was computed (OKLCH → sRGB → WCAG). Dark mode: all 21 pairs pass (tightest muted/surface-2 = 4.92:1; ink-dim 8–10:1; on-hi/amber button text 12.4:1; semantic inks 7–11:1). Light mode: all pass after nudging --ot-muted to 0.540 (muted/surface was 4.45 → 4.7:1). No usage was changed to hide a failure — only tokens.

Light mode — .ot-light

A token block on onetruck.css for printed pay statements (first consumer) and a future light shell. Paper-white bg, dark ink, and amber kept as a fill/tint; amber-as-text switches to --ot-hi-ink (darker ochre) because bright amber fails contrast on white. statement.html applies it: a bank-grade, penny-aligned pay statement — tenant-issued, "Powered by OneTruck" in the footer.

Type — the Saira superfamily

One engineered family across widths (stamped-steel, DIN-adjacent), deliberately not the tenant's Barlow/Inter. Tabular figures everywhere money appears. Display/wordmark = Saira Condensed 800; UI = Saira 400–700; data/tables = Saira Semi Condensed with "tnum". Fixed rem scale, 1.2 ratio.

Logo

Compact mark = a machined rounded-square badge in safety amber with an asphalt "1" on a road/flatbed baseline — nods to OneTruck (the "One") without a cartoon truck. Legible as a 16–32px favicon on light or dark (badge border hardened to hold on white). Wordmark pairs it with "OneTruck" in Saira Condensed; the mark carries the only color. Clear space ≈ the badge's corner radius.

Tagline (chosen)

"Run the whole business from your pocket." — set as the login hero. Plain, confident, working-class; fits the one-phone-in-the-field reality of the ICP. The growth line "Every business starts with one truck." rides quietly as the rail-footer signature.

Anti-slop notes

Not terminal-native dark and not SaaS-cream — a physical-world steel-and-PPE register grounded in the buyer's truck. No gradient text, no glassmorphism, no eyebrow on every section, no hero-metric template, no side-stripe borders. The one decorative device (the hazard stripe) is a deliberate brand signal, used once.