SeedMoney brand guidelines

Our values

• Community First — local leaders are the experts; we listen first, partner second.
• Grow Together — a culture of experimentation, learning, and shared knowledge.
• Support Self-Reliance — we help groups grow their own support, not just receive it.
• Think Big, Act Small — no project too small, no community too remote to matter.
• Equity Grows Here — we prioritize underserved groups and historically excluded voices.

Personality

The full mission & values framework lives as a separate internal document — this is the compressed, brand-facing version.

Primary — horizontal. Default lockup for light backgrounds.

On dark green. Green mark + white wordmark keeps the brand green visible.

Monochrome white. For photos, busy backgrounds, or single-color print.

Stacked. For square or vertical spaces — social avatars, app tiles, merch.

Mark alone. Once the brand is familiar — for avatars, app icons, and favicons.

Reversed mark. White version for dark backgrounds.

Source files: vector .ai masters exist for every variant — supply those to printers and designers. PNGs are for web and on-screen use.

Working text tokens (derived, not brand colors): ink #1C1C1C for headings, #333333 body text, muted #5A6B5E, hairline rule #D4E4D8. Black (#000000) is official but rarely used live — #1C1C1C reads softer on warm white.

Corner radius

One radius everywhere: 16 px. Cards, buttons, images, inputs. Pill shapes with fully rounded ends are retired; anything still using them predates July 2026 and should be converted.

Buttons: three roles

Every button in page content is one of three. The role follows what the button does, not how much visual weight a layout seems to want.

Solid green — primary

Donate, give, and the single most important action in a block. One per block.

Outline green — secondary

Sits beside a solid button, or stands alone where the ask is low-commitment: Learn more, See the map, Read the audit.

Outline eggplant — Apply only

The grantee path, under the color rule in section 03. Never used for anything else. In page content it is always an outline; the solid eggplant fill belongs to the nav button below.

Anatomy

Navigation buttons: the one exception

The Donate and Apply buttons in the main nav already sit at bright fill against a photo or dark masthead, so they can’t brighten further. They invert the rule: bright at rest, darkening within their own color family on hover, text staying white throughout. Shape, weight, and radius are unchanged, and the 3 px white border is what separates them from the imagery behind.

In code

Four canonical classes live in GeneratePress under Appearance → Customize → Additional CSS. Use them in Custom HTML blocks instead of writing local button styles, so a future change lands everywhere at once.

• .sm-btn-solid — primary
• .sm-btn-solid–hero — primary at hero size
• .sm-btn-ghost — secondary
• .sm-btn-ghost–apply — Apply

The nav buttons are theme menu items, not these classes, and are styled separately by their online-button and studio-button menu classes.

Voice

Warm, credible, and plainspoken. Lead with the point, then support it. Favor evergreen wording over date-specific copy wherever possible — it stays true longer and is easier for one person to maintain.

Data conventions

Consistency on the numbers protects credibility. The headline figures:

Illustration

When illustration is needed, use object-based watercolor imagery — seed, water, harvest — rather than people-based AI illustration. It reads as authentic to a plant-literate audience and avoids the tells that synthetic images of people carry.

Photography

A separate lane from illustration: the watercolor guidance above is for illustration; for photographs, real and documentary is the rule.

• Favor — real gardeners and growers, hands in soil, harvests and shared meals, volunteer work-days, the actual funded gardens; honest and a little imperfect.

• Avoid — generic stock, posed smiling-at-camera shots, staged “brochure diversity,” and aid or savior imagery.