Design concept prepared by The Recording Club · see why
Brand book · concept

Two businesses,
one system.

Vintage Vibe restores and builds instruments, and it sells the parts that keep every surviving one alive. The brand's whole job is to hold those two things together without letting the drawer bury the harp. This is that system, built from what is already on their pages.

01 · The split

Colour carries the two businesses.

Both colours are already theirs, pulled from their live store: teal is the dominant non-neutral, rust its companion. The system gives each one a job. Teal is instruments. Rust is parts. Nothing else needs an accent, because the accent is already saying which business you are in.

TEAL · #108474

Instruments

The harp side. Pianos, restorations, the flagship builds. Where a customer is spending thousands and wants to linger.

RUST · #D3552D

Parts

The drawer side. Tines, reeds, hammer tips. Where a technician wants the right component in three clicks and gone.

#108474Teal · instruments
on paper: 4.14:1 large
#D3552DRust · parts
on paper: 3.71:1 large
#F6F3ECPaper ground
warm, not white
#161513Deep
the bench section
#1C1A17Ink
on paper: 15.67:1 PASS

Ratios computed against the #F6F3EC ground by the WCAG 2.1 formula, not estimated. Teal (4.14) and rust (3.71) are both AA-large colours on this warm ground, so BOTH are used for prices, labels, links and headings, never for running body text. Body text is always ink (15.67). The accents mark and navigate; ink carries reading. That division is the constraint, and it is a deliberate one.

02 · The mark

A wordmark, and a rule that behaves like a tine.

The signature is not a logo flourish, it is a hairline: the tine rule that runs under every section head, teal on the instrument side, rust on the parts side. It thickens once, the way a Rhodes tine thickens where it meets its tone bar. One ornament, taken from the product itself.

Vintage Vibe
Vintage Vibe

Do

  • Use teal on the second word for instrument contexts, rust for parts.
  • Run the tine rule under every section head. It is the one recurring device.
  • Keep the ground warm. This is a wood, felt and brass company, not a metal one.

Do not

  • Introduce a third accent. Two colours, two businesses, nothing spare.
  • Put the mark on a dark ground. Their instruments are shot on white; honour that.
  • Use rust for body text. It is an AA-large colour by measurement.
03 · Type

A warm serif for the instruments, a monospace for the drawer.

Fraunces carries display: a reverse-contrast serif with genuine period character, right for a company honouring a 1965 instrument without dressing up as one. Open Sans stays as the body face, because it is theirs. IBM Plex Mono handles every part number, price and spec, because 433 of their 467 products are components and components want a monospace voice.

Fraunces 600Instruments
Fraunces 600Section heading
Open Sans 400Body copy, 16.5px at 1.66 line height
Plex Mono 400PART NO · PRICE · SPEC LABEL
04 · Photography

The harp deserves a photograph. So does the $6,300 Wurlitzer.

Their product photography is clean and consistent where it exists. The problem is not style, it is coverage: six products ship with no image at all, and three of those are the most expensive items in the store. A brand system cannot fix that, but it can refuse to hide it.

Use

  • Their existing white-ground product shots, cropped 4:3, front elevation leading.
  • The tine assembly and harp as hero imagery. It is the most beautiful object they make.
  • A clear "no photograph published" state, so a gap is visible rather than an empty card.

Avoid

  • Publishing a flagship instrument with no image. Three currently ship this way.
  • Mixing the parts-drawer density into the instrument pages.
  • Stock studio backgrounds. The white seamless they already use is correct.
05 · Voice

Restorer first. Say what the part is and what it fits.

Vintage Vibe's real voice is a technician's: exact, unshowy, dedicated to Harold Rhodes rather than to itself. "We are dedicated to honoring the vision of Harold Rhodes" is the whole brand in nine words.

Keep: part numbers, exact fitment, the founder's plain history, the reverence for the original instruments. Name the model. State what it fits.

Fix: the site currently says the company is "twenty five years" old in one place, "over twenty" in another, and "founded 1997" in a third. Standardise on 1997 and never print a duration, so the number cannot go stale again.

"The only company in the world manufacturing a line of pianos based on Harold Rhodes' ideas."

That is the sentence the whole instrument side should be built around, and it is already theirs.