# MLX Brand Identity

A living document. It says who MLX is, how MLX feels, how MLX talks and how MLX looks. Every poster, post, screen and sentence should be checkable against it. When we learn something new, we add it here. This file is the source; mlx.app/brand shows it.

Last updated: 19 October 2026 (naming, local first).

## The idea in one line

**The Apple Silicon Supercomputer.** Hundreds of millions of the best chips ever put in personal computers are sitting on desks, mostly idle. MLX joins them into one AI computer, and the people who own the Macs own the network.

## Vision

AI should not belong to five companies and a few power plants. The next great computer is not a building. It is already here, plugged in, in homes and offices all over the world. It just hasn't met yet.

## Mission

Make it effortless for any Mac to do useful AI work, check that work honestly, and pay the person who owns the Mac. Download, start, forget about it. That's the job.

## What we believe

- **The hardware is already here.** We don't need new data centres to start. We need to switch on what exists.
- **Useful beats wasteful.** Bitcoin taught computers to mine. MLX teaches them to think. Work on the network should leave something behind: an answer someone asked for.
- **Your Mac, your rules.** You start it, you stop it, you set the limits. Nothing runs without you saying so. MLX never reads your files, photos or messages.
- **Local first.** Your Mac runs your AI for you first, in MLX Harness, and nothing leaves it unless you send it. The network is for what one Mac can't do alone, and for lending its idle hours to others. Every Mac is a peer both ways, like BitTorrent.
- **Open and verifiable.** The ledger, the blocks and the network are public. Anyone can check them. Trust comes from what you can see, not from what we say.
- **Early is a feeling, not a promise.** We talk about being early the way people remember the first days of the internet or the pizza bought with bitcoin: with wonder, never with price targets.
- **Craft matters.** Apple silicon is beautiful engineering. Everything we make around it should be worth putting next to it.

## How MLX should feel

- **Calm confidence.** Never loud, never desperate. The quiet person in the room who turns out to have built the thing.
- **Warm, like a machine that's glad to help.** Orange is the glow of a Mac working at night: a small light on the desk while you sleep.
- **Clever, with a wink.** We earn a smile before we ask for anything. A good line should make someone screenshot it and send it to a friend.
- **On the side of the people.** Owners, tinkerers, builders, the person with an old MacBook Air. Not on the side of the giants.
- **Premium but not precious.** As polished as an Apple keynote, as relaxed as a group chat.

Emotions we want: curiosity ("wait, my Mac can do that?"), pride (my Mac is part of something), belonging (one of the early ones), fun (this is a good joke), trust (I'm in control).

Emotions we never use: fear of missing out, greed, urgency countdowns, guilt.

## Culture

- We build in public and ship fast, but we sweat the small details. A one-pixel jump is a bug.
- We credit people. The MLX framework community, open-source authors, builders who benchmark their Macs. We never claim their work.
- We are a community network first and a company second. Distributors, builders and Mac owners are partners, not "users".
- We are honest about risk. Anything about buying points to mlx.app/risks. No price promises, no return promises, ever.
- We show real data or nothing. If a number isn't real and sourced, it doesn't go on a page, a poster or a post. Example values are always labelled as examples.

## Voice

**Short. Specific. Cheeky. True.**

Think of the great ad campaigns of the computer age. One idea per piece, very few words, a twist at the end. Our house formats, with real examples from the ad bank:

- **The salute** (the Think Different family): "Here's to the idle ones. The Mac minis behind the TV. The MacBooks shut on the sofa."
- **The two-hander** (the Get a Mac family): "PC: I mine Bitcoin. Mac: What does that make? PC: Heat, mostly."
- **The shrink** (the "1,000 songs in your pocket" family): "One AI supercomputer. Made of the Macs already on people's desks."
- **The everyday ritual:** "Brush teeth. Charge phone. Start MLX."
- **The caption** (the "Shot on…" family): "Mined on MacBook Air." Always under a real, never-reused photo.
- **The contrast:** "Bitcoin: the most secure network on Earth, built on numbers nobody reads. MLX: a network built on answers someone asked for."
- **The hindsight:** "2009: 'Mining on a laptop? That's a hobby.' 2026: 'AI on a laptop? That's a hobby.' Hobbies are how networks start."
- **The reassurance:** "You start it. You stop it. Your Mac, your rules."

Rules of the voice:

1. One idea per piece. If it needs a second sentence to be funny, it isn't ready.
2. The punchline goes last. The setup is plain; the turn is sharp.
3. Plain words. No jargon unless the joke is the jargon. Say "AI work", not "inference workloads".
4. Joke with Bitcoin and data centres, never at people. Respect the Bitcoin pioneers; we are their students.
5. No hashtags. At most one emoji, and usually none.
6. No usage numbers until they are worth showing. No prices or returns in jokes.
7. We may riff on the famous ad formats, but never copy Apple's slogans, logos or artwork, and never imply Apple is involved. "MLX is not affiliated with Apple Inc." wherever Apple is central.
8. British-leaning spelling in long copy ("data centre"); always "Mac", "Apple silicon", "M-series".
9. Clickbait is allowed in the setup, never in the facts. The hook may tease; the payoff must be true.

Every line we publish gets a poster in the library, numbered in one running series. Keep writing more in the same direction: witty, cheeky, smart, meme-able, and true.

## Naming

- **MLX**: the network and the token. Written in capitals. In a logo it is always the wordmark (the X at 70%).
- **MLX.app**: the website. **MLX** is also the iPhone and iPad companion app (its App Store name is "MLX.app").
- **MLX Node**: the Mac menu bar app that works for the network and mines MLX. Never "MLX for macOS" or "the Mac app" any more. A **node** (lower case) is any Mac running MLX Node.
- **MLX Harness**: the Mac app for running models yourself (built on vMLX by JANGQ AI). It carries MLX Node inside and installs it on first run.
- **Dedicated seats**: what people buy. Nano, Lite, Core, Pro and Ultra seats, always capitalised; "Latest" editions for the newest chips; "Seat #12". A dedicated seat works like a stake: it reserves a Mac's place on the network and sets how fast it mines (never say it pays a reward up front: since 20 October 2026 seats only mine); first in line for paid AI jobs is planned, so say "planned". A Mac without one runs on a **free seat**. Never call the thing you buy a "node". Full rules: docs/NAMING-2026-10-19.md.
- **MLX World**, **MLX Builders**, **the Explorer**.
- Never "MLX 2.0", never "Apple MLX" for our network. Apple's open-source MLX framework is theirs, and we credit it.

## Logo

- **Emblem** (box): a rounded square with the X knocked out. The main mark: header, favicon, app icon.
- **Emblem outline**: secondary surfaces such as footers and checkout.
- **Token** (circle outline): the MLX token, wherever an amount is shown. The filled coin is for small sizes.
- **The X**: an ornament and a pattern element, never the logo on its own.
- **Wordmark**: "MLX" set extra bold and tight, the X at 70% opacity. Always the outlined file or the `<Wordmark/>` component, never retyped.
- **Lockup**: the emblem, then the wordmark, centred on the same line.

The marks come from the Material Design Icons "alpha-x" shapes (Pictogrammers, Apache 2.0).

Use the gradient version on light (ink to orange) and on dark (white to orange). When colour isn't possible, use solid black, white or orange. Keep clear space of at least half the emblem's height on every side. Don't stretch, rotate, outline, add effects, recolour outside the palette, or put the mark on busy photos without a plate.

## Colour

The palette is a Mac at night: dark glass, warm light.

| Name | Hex | Use |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Ink | #1d1d1f | Text and marks on light; the start of the light gradient |
| MLX Orange | #f08a00 | The brand colour; the end of the light gradient, buttons, highlights |
| Glow | #ffa21a | Orange on dark backgrounds; the end of the dark gradient |
| Amber | #f8b13b | Poster accents on dark |
| Paper | #faf9f5 | Light poster and print background |
| Night | #111214 | Dark poster background |
| Black | #000000 | Dark-mode app background |
| Silver | #f5f5f7 | Text on dark; the start of the dark gradient |
| Grey | #6e6e73 / #8e8e93 | Secondary text on light / dark |

The brand gradient runs diagonally, top left to bottom right: Ink → Orange on light, Silver → Glow on dark. Orange is a light source: use it for the one thing that matters on a screen or poster, not for everything. A good test: one orange thing per view.

Apple's system colours (blue, indigo, purple, pink, teal, green, mint, yellow) appear only as soft glass tints on repeated cards, never as brand colours.

## Type

- **On screens: SF Pro**, through the system font stack. Headlines are bold, tight (about −0.045em) and short. Body is regular at comfortable sizes. Numbers that change use tabular figures.
- **Code, hashes, addresses: SF Mono.**
- **In downloadable artwork: Inter Display.** SF Pro can't be redistributed, so posters and outlined logos use Inter Display, the closest open face.
- Sentence case everywhere. Headlines end with a full stop when they are a statement: "Pick your node."
- One headline idea per screen. If a headline needs two lines, the second is usually the accent.

## Design style

**Liquid glass on a dark, quiet stage.**

- **Glass surfaces**: translucent panels with a fine rim of light, a soft pointer sheen that follows the cursor, and a faint system-colour tint that cycles across repeated cards.
- **Depth over decoration**: shadows, blur and light do the work. No gratuitous lines, boxes or icons.
- **Product as hero**: the Mac, the menu bar, the wallet. Real screens, real data, or clearly labelled examples.
- **Lots of space.** Big headline, one supporting line, one action.
- **Illustration**: simple, rounded, slightly three-dimensional objects in brand colours (a laptop with the X on its screen, a glowing toggle, a pause button, a field of X marks). No stock photos, no robots, no glowing brains, no blockchain cubes.
- **Patterns**: the X grid. Many quiet X marks, one of them orange: the single Mac that just joined.

## Layout

- **Posters**: 4:5 (1600×2000) and story 9:16 (1080×1920). "MLX.app" top left, the series number top right, a big headline, one illustration, one plain line, then "The Apple Silicon Supercomputer." and mlx.app. Small print: "Not affiliated with Apple Inc."
- **Square cards**: 1080×1080 for quotes and two-handers.
- **Screens**: a centred column up to about 1200 px; two columns on wide screens for the wallet; everything works at phone width first.
- **Grid**: generous outer margins (about 8% of the width on posters), corner radii of 28 / 20 / 14 px for panels / cards / controls.

## Motion

- Every change of height or position is animated. No jump cuts.
- Movement uses springs and soft ease-outs, short and physical: things settle, they don't bounce around.
- Numbers that grow count up live and never jump backwards for small corrections.
- Respect reduced-motion settings.

## UX principles

1. **One next step.** Every screen has one obvious thing to do.
2. **You're in control.** Start, stop, pause and limits are always one tap away.
3. **Explain with the product, not with paragraphs.** Footnotes are for fees, risks and the law.
4. **Same everywhere.** The website, the Mac app and the iPhone app share colours, type, marks and words.
5. **Thirty languages.** Write copy that translates: short, literal, no idioms in the UI. The jokes live in marketing, where each market can get its own.
6. **Honest states.** Show "Paused", "In review", "Soon" when that's the truth.

## Video

- **Fast.** 10 to 14 seconds, a new beat every second or so. The hook lands in the first half second: a face-off, a number, a date, a question.
- **Look like a product film, not a cartoon.** The preferred style is the white canvas: Macs drawn in their true proportions with aluminium light and soft contact shadows, lots of white space, one calm headline at a time, slow eased camera moves. No faces on products, no clip-art, no glow everywhere. Orange appears once, when the Mac starts working.
- **One idea, told with objects.** A gaming PC frying an egg, a plug going into a wall socket, a laptop lid closing at night, a toggle flicked on and off. Something you can describe to a friend in one sentence.
- **Kinetic type.** Words slam in one by one, big and tight; the turn is in amber. Chat bubbles for two-handers.
- **Sound.** An original track for every video (pulse, trap, funk, cinematic, lo-fi or bright, in its own key and tempo), hits on every cut and a sting on the end card, all made by us. The video must also work muted.
- **Borrow a famous format, then twist it.** Each video should feel like a different kind of film: the nature documentary (Field notes), the movie trailer ("In a world…", Rated M for Mac), the pharma ad (side effects read at speed), the late-night infomercial ("But wait, there's more!"), the two-hander on a white void. Never two in a row in the same format.
- **Field notes.** The documentary series: a dry British narrator observes Macs like wildlife (the Mac mini mistaken for a coaster, the evening migration of the lids, the iMac as a social creature). Voice only, no music.
- **Voices.** A narrator or a cast of two reads the lines: female and male, American and British. The Mac is usually a woman's voice, the PC and the data centre a man's. Lines are short and spoken the way people talk; the video stretches a little so no line is rushed.
- **The end card** is always the same: the emblem pops, MLX.app, "The Apple Silicon Supercomputer.", "Download free for Mac", "Not affiliated with Apple Inc."
- **Format.** 1080×1920, 30 fps. Text stays clear of the bottom 380 px and the right edge, where the apps put captions and buttons.
- Made in code (scripts/brand/video), so every frame is sharp and every video can be remade in another language.

## Rumour desk

When there's Apple or Mac news (an event, a leak, a new chip, a price cut), we answer within the hour with a meme that ties it back to the idea: the Macs people already own, waiting for something worth doing.

- **Fast beats perfect.** A square card the same day, a poster the next morning, a short video by event day.
- **React to what's reported, never invent it.** The pill on the card says what the news is ("Rumour · new iMac", "New MacBook Pro · 28 Oct"). No made-up specs, prices or dates.
- **Find the old Mac in the story.** Every new Mac means an older one heading for a drawer, and every launch is a reminder of how much power sits asleep. That's our turn.
- **Never Apple's logo, product photos or event slogans on the art.** Their names for products are fine as plain words; the joke is ours.
- Kind, never sneering about Apple or the people who buy Macs. We're fans.

## Photography and video

- Real Macs in real places: kitchen tables, bookshelves, studios, a Mac mini behind the TV. Night light, warm lamps, the glow of a screen.
- Never reuse the same photo or video in two posts.
- Videos are 9:16, silent-friendly, with text kept clear of the bottom caption area; they end on mlx.app.

## The library

Everything we make lives at **mlx.app/brand**: logos, posters, quote cards, memes, wallpapers, patterns, covers, photos, video, press material and this document. If it was made for MLX, it goes there, so anyone can download it and use it to talk about MLX.

- Download, share and post the files to talk about MLX.
- Don't change the marks, imply an official partnership, or use them for another product.
- MLX is not affiliated with Apple Inc. Apple, Mac, MacBook, Mac mini, iMac, Mac Studio and Apple silicon are trademarks of Apple Inc.
- Questions and press: contact@mlx.app.