A name should do work.
Iron & Ember does three things at once. Iron is structural - durable, compiled, the material you build things to last from. Ember is what stays hot after the fire. Not the flame itself, but the warmth that persists. Forge is where the two meet: where raw material becomes something shaped with intention.
The visual identity takes its name from that tension. Structure and heat. Permanence and warmth.
The mark
The logomark is a hexagon. An orange outer ring, a steel inner border, a warm white interior. Inside it, an organic flame form sweeps in a fluid S-curve - orange against the white, alive and in motion.
That is the intention. What emerged, and what we kept, is something else.
Look at the negative space. The white that the flame moves around. The shape that forms there is not abstract. It reads as a figure - upright, one arm raised. A smith at the forge, mid-strike.
It was not designed in. It arrived when the form was refined. Once you see it, you do not unsee it.
The palette
Steel (#2e3038) is the navbar. It holds the product name and primary navigation. It does not change when the content changes.
Near-black (#111113) is for developer sections and the devlog. Darker, denser. The technical depth lives there.
Orange (#FF5F1F) appears only when something asks you to act. Primary actions, active states, section numbers. Not decoration, not links, not an accent colour scattered across the interface. One job.
Blue (#006493) marks the developer path - links in docs, the developer track on the docs landing page. It is not warm. That separation is deliberate.
The content surfaces are warm. Close to cream where the decision-maker reads. Not clinical, not cold. A surface that says: you are welcome here too.
The typeface
Plus Jakarta Sans across everything. No monospace, no terminal reference.
Most tools in this space signal their audience through type before a word is read. Monospace says: engineers only, come prepared. Forge is built for engineers and for the person deciding whether their team should adopt it. Plus Jakarta Sans is warm at large sizes, precise at small ones. It reads like a considered choice, not a default.
Warmth as an invitation
The line on the OG banner is "Forge turns conversations into content." That is what the design needs to feel like.
Not infrastructure. Not a pipeline. A conversation that goes somewhere - from first idea to published page, with the right people and the right rules in place.
The design needed to feel like that conversation could start here. Warm enough to walk into. Structured enough to trust. The surfaces are light where the decision-maker reads. The type is approachable. Orange appears only when something is ready to move.
The hexagon holds the flame. The flame holds the figure. The figure holds a hammer, mid-strike.
Iron becomes useful when heat is applied. That is still the whole idea.
forge-cms.dev - github.com/forge-cms/forge
-- @ravnthers