# Politick — Brand & Visual Identity Brief

*Source text for design ideation (human or image-model). Distilled from the project
research in `_dev/research/` and `PLAN.md`. Spelling is **Politick** — never "PoliTick".*

## What Politick is

Politick is **public-interest democratic infrastructure for the AI era**. It turns the
fragmented public record of a government — starting with Sri Lanka's parliamentary Hansard —
into something **readable, searchable, and verifiable**: every speech, every MP, every
sitting, in plain English, traceable back to the original document.

One-liner in use: *"What your Parliament said this week — on the record, in plain English."*
Founders' shorthand: *"Finance has Bloomberg, leisure has Airbnb; democracy needs Politick."*

## The problem it solves

What an MP says in parliament is nominally public but practically buried — hundreds of dense,
trilingual (Sinhala/Tamil/English) scanned PDFs that nobody reads. Politick reads them so you
don't have to: it extracts, translates, summarises and tags the record, and makes it browsable
around the people and the issues citizens actually care about.

## What the product does

- A free public record: MPs, speeches, sittings, parties, 18 policy topics, full-text search.
- Everything is **traceable to its primary source** (Hansard date, page, column; "view source").
- AI does quiet, useful jobs — speaker matching, summarising, topic tagging — always **labelled**.
- It grows: bills, votes, gazettes, cabinet decisions, budgets next; eventually other countries.
- Later, an API / data layer so other tools and AI systems can ground on a verified source.

## Who it's for

Ordinary **citizens first** (find your MP, follow an issue), then **journalists and
researchers** (cite, compare, export), and eventually **diplomats, analysts and businesses**
(the premium intelligence layer). It must feel credible to an embassy *and* welcoming to a
first-time citizen. Rooted in Sri Lanka and the Global South; built to travel.

## Brand personality

Neutral · Trustworthy · Authoritative yet accessible · Transparent · Calm · Rigorous ·
Public-interest · Quietly modern · Enduring.

It should feel like **a permanent public record you can trust** — closer to a national
archive or a newspaper of record than to a startup app or a government portal.

## What the identity must express

1. **Impartiality and trust** — visibly non-partisan; nothing that reads as taking a side.
2. **The record / primary source** — provenance, verifiability, permanence.
3. **Clarity** — making the buried and dense suddenly legible.
4. **Public good & people-centredness** — open, for everyone, not elite or gated.
5. **Global-South rootedness that scales** — Sri Lankan now, but a system, not a souvenir.

## Hard constraints (from the product doctrine — do not violate)

- **Strictly non-partisan.** No national flag or flag colours, no lion/state emblem, no party
  colours or symbols, no politician likenesses. Nothing nationalist or factional.
- **Neutral and procedural**, never activist or protest-aesthetic.
- **AI is a quiet utility, not a gimmick** — no robots, no "AI sparkle", no neural-net motifs.
- **Free-tier-first** — approachable and democratic, not exclusive or luxury.

## Clichés to avoid

Generic civic-tech blue; ballot boxes, ticked checkboxes as the whole idea, handshakes, domes,
classical columns, speech-bubble clichés; government-portal blandness; crypto/AI-startup
gradients, glows and 3D blobs; stock "democracy/diversity" photography; over-ornamentation.

## Practical requirements

- A **wordmark** ("Politick") and a **compact mark/monogram** that still works at 16px (favicon)
  and as an app icon.
- **Light and dark** treatments.
- A **motif / pattern / texture** reusable for dividers, empty states, social/citation cards,
  and section accents.
- **One restrained accent** over a neutral base; accessible contrast (WCAG AA+).
- A type pairing: a voice for headlines/reading and a clear UI face; tabular numerals for data.

## Where the identity lives

Record pages (speeches, MP profiles, sittings), search and light data-viz (sparklines, simple
charts, a party×topic "Pulse"), social/citation cards, a future API/docs site, and eventually
per-country editions sitting under the one Politick brand.

## Touchstones (for feel, not to copy)

The printed parliamentary record (Hansard, order papers); newspaper-of-record mastheads;
archive and library catalogue systems; the function of TheyWorkForYou / GovTrack but with a
genuine identity; the rigour of a financial/intelligence terminal — made humane and public.