The Vortex IQ brand, in one place.
Logo rules, colour tokens, typography, UI components, the four pillars, and the full tone-of-voice guide. Everything a partner, a designer, or a writer needs to put the AI Operating System for e-commerce in front of an audience. On brand, every time.
Start with the promise.
Every design and every sentence exists to make one claim believable. If a decision does not serve this line, it is the wrong decision.
Vortex IQ is the fair-code AI Operating System for e-commerce.
Intelligent agents that watch your store, explain what's wrong, and fix it. Every action staged, human-approved, and exactly reversible. Across every platform you run.
Source-available and self-hostable, not open source. A Sustainable Use license keeps cloud rivals from reselling our hosted version.
Not analytics. Not dashboards. Active, not passive. The system does the watching so your team does the deciding.
The thing your stack runs on, not another tool you bolt on beside it. That distinction carries the whole positioning.
A narrow category, named in the first line. Not for businesses. Not for retailers. Specifically e-commerce.
One loop, five steps
One mark, two finishes.
Use the full-colour mark on light surfaces and the white mark on dark or brand-deep backgrounds. Keep clear space around it, and never recolour or distort it.
on all four sidesMinimum size
Below these sizes the IQ stops resolving. If the space is tighter than this, use the icon on its own instead of shrinking the full mark.
Usage rules
- Use the full-colour logo on white and light surfaces.
- Switch to the white logo on dark or brand-deep backgrounds.
- Keep clear space around the mark equal to the height of the V.
- Scale proportionally and use the provided SVG wherever possible.
- Hold a minimum width of 110px on screen and 25mm in print.
- Place it on enough contrast that it stays clearly legible.
- Recolour, add gradients, or apply effects to the mark.
- Stretch, squash, rotate, or distort the proportions.
- Place the logo on a busy image or a low-contrast background.
- Add a drop shadow, outline, or box around the mark.
- Recreate, re-typeset, or alter the wordmark in any way.
- Write VortexIQ, Vortex-IQ, or VORTEX IQ. It is Vortex IQ, two words.
Purple leads. Everything else supports.
These are the exact tokens the product and the website run on. Click any value to copy it. Status colours carry meaning, so they never appear as decoration.
Brand
Purple leads everything. Deep purple grounds dark sections and the footer. Blue is a rare secondary accent, never a substitute for purple.
Surfaces
White is the canvas. Soft grey separates alternating sections. The purple tint carries callouts, chips, and anything that should read as brand-owned.
Text
Near-black for headings, 60% black for body, 40% for metadata. Pure black is never used.
Status
Status colours carry meaning, so they never appear as decoration. Green is healthy or recovered, red is revenue at risk, amber is watching.
Gradients
Geist, end to end.
Geist sets every headline and paragraph. Geist Mono handles eyebrows, labels, metadata, and code: the small, precise type that gives the brand its technical edge. Stylistic sets ss01, ss03 and ss04 are on site-wide.
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz 0123456789
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz 0123456789
The scale
The rest of the system.
Radius, layout rhythm, elevation, and motion. Four small sets that do most of the work of making a new page look like it belongs.
Radius
| --radius | 10px | Cards, panels, inputs |
| --radius-pill | 200px | Every button and chip |
| (product visuals) | 14px to 18px | Floating console cards |
Layout
| --max | 1180px | Container width |
| --bento-gap | 30px | Grid gap, every bento |
| .section | 7.5rem 0 | Vertical section rhythm |
| nav height | 4.5rem | Fixed header |
Elevation
| --shadow-sm | 0 1px 2px / 0 1px 3px | Chips, small tiles |
| --shadow-md | 0 6px 20px / 0 2px 6px | Raised cards |
| --shadow-lg | 0 20px 50px / 0 6px 16px | Hover state, floating visuals |
| --shadow-brand | 0 14px 40px rgba(85,41,214,.22) | Primary button hover |
Motion
| --ease | cubic-bezier(.16,1,.3,1) | Every transition |
| hover lift | translateY(-1px to -3px) | Buttons and cards |
| reveal | 600ms, 22px rise | Scroll-in sections |
| reduced motion | animations off | Always honoured |
The parts we build pages from.
Everything below is live CSS from the shipped design system, not a screenshot. Buttons are always pills. Cards are always 10px. Nothing here needs inventing twice.
Buttons
Chips, badges, and status
Cards and stats
Nerve Centre
Watches every KPI live across 200+ connectors.
Vortex Mind
The memory graph that compounds, per store.
Ask Viq™
Conversational agent, cited back to the graph.
Building blocks
- Stateful orchestration
- Managed context windows
- No LLM ops to run
KPI rows, chat, and FAQ
How fast is the first audit?
1 to 3 days. Connect your stack, the instant store audit runs, then the Nerve Centre keeps watching live.
Which platforms do you support?
BigCommerce, Shopify, Adobe Commerce and WooCommerce, plus over 200 connectors in the AI OS catalogue.
Will I lose control of my store?
Every change runs through staging first. Backup runs continuously. Rollback is one click.
Signature product visuals
Name the mechanism, every time.
Do not just say what we do, name how. A sceptic who can file the how away stops asking. These four nouns are the how, and they are always title-case and never paraphrased.
Nerve Centre
The detection layer. Every KPI, live, across 200+ connectors.
Always title-case. Always paired with real-time or continuous. It senses, it does not diagnose or act.
Vortex Mind
The diagnostic layer. It investigates the finding, returns the root cause, and remembers per store. The knowledge graph (the memory graph) lives here.
Always paired with explains why or root cause. It absorbs the memory graph, so Vortex Memory is now only the name of that graph, never a standalone pillar.
Ask Viq
The conversational layer, answering from the graph and citing what it drew the answer from.
Ask Viq™ on the first prominent mention of a page. Bare Ask Viq after that. It answers, it does not act.
Vortex Agents
Execute changes safely. Staging, backup, and one-click rollback are the harness every agent runs inside.
Always paired with act safely or safe and reversible. It absorbs staging, backup, and rollback. Team members inside an agent are sub-agents, never specialists. Agent Hub and the old Vortex Apps pillar are retired.
Four qualities, testable line by line.
Voice is what stays constant everywhere we write. Run any sentence against these four. If it fails one, it is not finished.
Confident, not arrogant
We have built this for global brands. We know the chaos because we have fixed it. Write from that authority, but never lecture, never condescend, never imply the reader is failing.
Anti-chaos, action-led
The brand exists because running e-commerce should not feel like fighting fires. Every line should imply less work, less anxiety, more control. Lead with verbs. Stop X, start Y is on-brand and repeatable.
Concrete over abstract
Numbers, names, mechanisms. If a sentence could appear on any SaaS landing page, rewrite it until it could only appear on ours.
Warm, not corporate
Vortex IQ is built by people who lived the problem. The voice should feel like a senior peer pulling up a chair, not a vendor pitching from a stage. Contractions, second person, plain words.
Voice stays. Tone shifts.
Same brand, dialled differently for the surface. A hero rallies. A docs page explains. An error message apologises softly and names the next step.
| Surface | Dial up | Dial down | Anchor |
|---|---|---|---|
| Marketing hero | Anti-chaos | Concrete, concision beats numbers here | Stop fighting fires. Protect revenue and automate ops. |
| Product pages | Concrete, name mechanisms and proof | Nothing, all four run high | Four pillars, one platform. Eyes, Voice, Hands. |
| Help docs | Concrete plus Confident | Anti-chaos, less rallying and more explaining | The Shopify connector is one of 200+ feeding the Nerve Centre. |
| In-app labels | Concrete, short and specific | Warm, no chatter inside buttons | Run Audit, not Get started with your audit journey. |
| Empty states and errors | Warm | Confident, apologise softly when something is wrong | We couldn't reach Shopify just now. Reconnecting in 30s. |
| Social | All four, the format demands voice density | Nothing, but keep it short | One mechanism named per post. One proof point per post. |
Nine triggers, mapped to the funnel.
Where the reader stands changes what they need to hear. Use this as a checklist before anything ships.
The reader has never heard of us. They scan in half a second. One job: make them feel named, seen, and at ease.
Frame the specific category
Name the exact bucket the reader sits in. A specific role plus a specific pain, never a general audience.
Identity matching, not identity attacking
Mirror who they already think they are. Never open with you're doing it wrong. That wakes the defensive brain and they are gone.
Fluency
Short sentences. Familiar words. Predictable rhythm. Read every top-of-funnel paragraph out loud, and wherever you stumble, rewrite. Non-negotiable on the homepage hero.
The reader is interested and is now testing plausibility. We are not asking for the sale, we are earning the right to.
Name the unique mechanism
Don't just say what we do, name how. Give it a noun so a sceptic can file the how away and stop asking. Our nouns are the four pillars.
Typically atypical
Strong claims need calibrating language so the brain does not reject them. Add time frames. Add ratios. Prefer more than half to an exact multiple that sounds invented.
Boring by design
Kill objections in monotone. Flat, factual prose signals this is not a big deal. Drama signals the opposite. Two or three lines per objection, no exclamation marks.
The reader believes. Now they need to feel safe saying yes.
Choice framing
Three options, ours in the middle. The brain pattern-matches on three. Make the other two real, not strawmen, so the choice reads as honest.
Transparent trade-offs
Name what is not included. Result, but limitation. Stating the limit builds trust faster than any feature list.
Big proof, small bite
One boulder, not a wall. A grid of twelve logos triggers suspicion. One specific, credible, named proof point lets both the fast and the slow brain sign off.
Objections, killed in monotone
Approved proof points
Pick the one that fits the audience. Show one, never all four.
- Krispy Kreme's e-commerce ops team uses Vortex IQ to monitor across BigCommerce, Stripe and GA4 from a single Nerve Centre.
- Wells Stringham, Head of Experience at Apply Digital: saved us at least a week of dev time.
- Olaf Akkerman, GM Retail UK at Microsoft: Vortex IQ stands out by showing merchants what's broken, why it happened, and how to fix it automatically.
- Reduced quote turnaround by 96% on a single Adobe Commerce B2B engagement.
The words we use, and the ones we never do.
Half of brand consistency is vocabulary discipline. Run any draft through this table before it ships.
| Use | Not |
|---|---|
| AI OS, AI Operating System | platform, tool, app, software |
| commerce, e-commerce | online retail, e-tail, digital commerce |
| merchant | client, customer, user, end-user |
| ops lead, growth lead, founder | stakeholder, decision-maker, executive |
| connector | integration, plugin, app |
| Nerve Centre, Vortex Mind, Ask Viq, Vortex Agents | any paraphrase, any lower-case version |
| Ask Viq™ on first prominent mention | AskViq, Ask VIQ, ask viq |
| detect, explain, fix | monitor, analyse, recommend |
| safe, predictable, controlled | bulletproof, guaranteed, foolproof |
| over 200 connectors, in the AI OS catalogue | many, all the major, 215+, 70+ |
| catalogue, mapped | supported, integrated |
| 14-day free trial, free for 14 days | free forever, freemium |
| four pillars | four modules, four products |
Banned phrases
Punctuation
Never use an em dash. Never use an en dash either.
Not in marketing copy, not in docs, not in CMS content, not in a social post. The em dash is overused, it reads as machine-written to a lot of readers, and the voice prefers shorter, more declarative sentences anyway. A hyphen covers every legitimate compound case.
| Where you would reach for one | Use instead | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Parenthetical aside | comma, comma | Vortex IQ, the AI OS for commerce, runs on every connector you have. |
| Emphasis or summary clause | colon or full stop | One operating system. Detect, explain, fix. |
| Strong aside or clarification | parentheses | Connect your stack (10 minutes max). The Nerve Centre does the rest. |
| Range or span | to, or a hyphen | 5 to 15 minutes. Q2-Q3. |
| Compound modifier | hyphen | AI-driven, 24-7, top-quartile. |
Owned hooks
Four structures that carry most of our writing.
When you are staring at a blank page, pick the pattern that matches the format and fill it in. The structure is already approved, so you only have to be good at the sentences.
StoryBrand
- Character: name the merchant and what they want
- Problem: external (fragmented tools), internal (overwhelmed team), philosophical (this shouldn't feel like firefighting)
- Guide: empathy (we've lived it) plus authority (the logos, the case studies)
- Plan: Connect, Activate, Optimise
- Call to action: direct (start free) plus transitional (see a sample report)
- Success: what life looks like running Vortex IQ
- Failure: what it costs to keep doing it the old way
PEACE soundbite
- Problem: the one most readers nod at
- Empathy: we know how this feels
- Authority: one credible proof point
- CTA: one clear next step
- Evidence: one quantified outcome
Three-option close
- Always offer exactly three
- Position ours as the middle
- Make the other two real options, not strawmen
- Mark the middle one, the way pricing marks Growth as most popular
Card body
- Card class line, category, tier
- At a glance
- Calculation
- Worked example
- Sibling cards
- Reconciling against the vendor's own dashboard
- Known limitations and merchant FAQs
- Tracked live in Nerve Centre, the closing CTA
What changes, surface by surface.
The rules below sit on top of everything above. Where a channel carries extra legal or trust risk, the voice gets tighter, not louder.
Marketing site
- Lead every page with the AI OS framing.
- The hero must pass the half-second scan test.
- One big proof point per page, never a wall of logos.
- One headline price per pricing tier, with the annual maths in small print.
- Keep Growth as the marked middle of the self-serve path.
Comparison hub
- Facts only. Every competitor claim sourced to their own public pages and cited on the page.
- No disparagement. Describe accurately what they do well.
- Complementary, not superior. They own one slice, we are the cross-stack operating layer.
- One clear CTA at the end, the free audit.
Limits and guardrails
- Boring by design. State the hard rules in flat prose. The calm tone is the message.
- Transparent trade-offs. Ranges not guarantees, live connector counts not roadmap totals.
- Keep safety mechanics scoped. Staging and one-click rollback are BigCommerce, Shopify, and Adobe Commerce. Approval-gating is universal.
Help docs
- Open each connector landing with the AI OS connection: this connector is one of 200+ feeding the Nerve Centre.
- Merchant-friendly does not mean stripping the brand frame. Keep the pillar names.
- Avoid jargon the merchant will not recognise. Never avoid our own product names.
- Worked examples stay concrete and merchant-readable.
In-app
- Buttons: one to three words, verb-led. Run Audit, Connect, View finding.
- Empty states: warm and specific. No findings yet. Connect your first source to put the Nerve Centre to work.
- Errors: monotone and factual, and always name the next step.
- Alerts: lead with impact in plain English. Catalogue drift on 14 SKUs. £8,400 at risk.
- Onboarding: name the AI OS on the first screen and set the frame.
Social
- All four voice pillars run high. The format rewards voice density.
- One mechanism named per post.
- One proof point per post.
- Short. If it needs a scroll, it needs a cut.
The rules, applied.
Five real edits from our own surfaces. Use them as anchors when you are unsure whether a draft is on brand.
The AI Operating System That Runs Your Entire eCommerce Operation. Deploy a 24/7 Digital Workforce that connects every app in your stack. We give your business the Eyes to monitor every KPI, the Voice to strategize, and the Hands to execute tasks automatically.
The AI Operating System for E-Commerce. Detect what's broken. Understand why. Fix it safely. Across every platform you run.
Active Subscribers (Est.) is a customer lifecycle metric tracked from ActiveCampaign data.
The Nerve Centre tracks Active Subscribers (Est.) from your ActiveCampaign account in real time. When the number moves, Vortex Mind investigates why, and Ask Viq acts on the finding.
You don't have any findings yet. To get started, please connect your first data source by going to the Connectors page in your Settings.
No findings yet. Connect your first source to put the Nerve Centre to work.
Vortex IQ: your weekly performance report is ready
What the Nerve Centre found in your store this week
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Take the whole thing with you.
The complete brand book, the same content as this page, in the format that suits your workflow. No form, no sign-up. The HTML version prints straight to PDF from any browser.
Brand guidelines, Markdown
The full book as plain Markdown. Drop it into Notion, a docs repo, or an AI writing assistant as the house style file.
One file, no assetsDownload.htmlBrand guidelines, HTML
A styled, self-contained page. Open it in any browser, share it with an agency, or print it to PDF straight from the browser.
One file, print-readyDownload.svgLogo, full colour
The primary mark for white and light surfaces. Vector, so it scales to any size without loss.
SVG, transparentDownload.svgLogo, white
The reversed mark for dark and brand-deep backgrounds. Same geometry, single colour.
SVG, transparentDownloadWriting about us, or building with us?
For interviews, founder bios, partnership announcements, or a tailored asset pack, get in touch and the right person on our team will help.
