What's in here.

1. 01The story04
2. 02The logo07
3. 03The colours10
4. 04The typography13
5. 05The voice16
6. 06The ear cast19
7. 07The thinking23

Before you go any further.

This is the whole brand in one place. If it isn't in here, we haven't decided it yet — so go ahead and ask, don't guess.

Here's the thing about a small brand: it drifts if you let it. The blue creeps a few shades off. Someone writes "we are thrilled to announce" and means well, and suddenly we sound like a phone company. The logo ends up squished onto a lime-green background at a craft fair. None of that is anyone's fault — it's just what happens when the rules live in one person's head instead of on a page.

So I wrote them down. Everything in here we chose on purpose, and where there's a rule there's a reason sitting right next to it. Follow it and the whole thing stays of a piece — the website, the bags, the farmers' market table, a thank-you note three Christmases from now.

xo, Willow & Julianna

How a kitchen-counter idea became a bakery.

Most good ideas in this family start at the kitchen counter. This one took a few years to leave it.

Willow and I have been talking about a pet treat business since she was six. We'd float a name, sketch a logo on the back of something, get properly serious for an evening — and then dinner would happen. Or homework. Or it'd be bedtime, or a laptop would die mid-sentence, or life would just keep on lifeing. The whole thing got shelved until the next round. For about five years that was the pattern.

Well, life be darned — it's time. We're doing it now, mostly because at eleven Willow is genuinely awesome and self-sufficient and I can trust her not to lose a finger to the stand mixer without me in the room. (Just don't hand the kid a grapefruit knife. That's a story for another day.) This is officially her gig. I'm her partner on the build — on oven timers, on anything that needs a credit card, and on the bits that take grown-up expertise. Don't tell her that last part; she'll say otherwise.

Where the name came from

Fin was our first dog — the one we brought every single kid home to. He'd appointed himself canine household manager long before Willow showed up, and he loved her exactly the way she loved him: patiently, steadily, always nearby. He passed this spring, just shy of thirteen. He epitomized what a great dog life looked like. And what a great dog looked like, while he was at it. He set a high standard here, I tell you.

Oak came along a few years after Fin and learned the whole job from him. He's the easiest creature in the house — lives to sunbathe on the deck, lets the chaos roll past him, has never once had a complicated day. We named the bakery for both of them.

Who's actually here

Two dogs, six cats, a few chickens with strong opinions, and the geese — who, for the record, don't like anyone. Piper is the youngest, Willow's girl through and through; she came along after the name was already settled.

The wordmark.

"Fin & Oak" in Playfair, with "Bark Bakery" tracked out underneath. The type is the whole identity — there's no little icon doing the heavy lifting.

Using the mark

The palette.

Four colours do all the work. Everything else is a quieter version of one of them.

The 60–30–10 rule

Roughly 60% cream, 30% ink and empty space, and 10% blue-and-caramel between them. The accents only work while they stay accents — a page where everything's blue is a page where nothing is. Apple Leaf never gets more room than blue and caramel together.

The supporting shades, with hex codes:

Three faces, three jobs.

The actual numbers

Defaults, not laws — if the room calls for something else, the room wins.

How we sound.

The test: if a marketing department could've written it, rewrite it. If it sounds like a specific person in a specific kitchen, you've got it.

This is us. This isn't.

The cast.

Fifteen ear silhouettes that run through everything — dividers, bullets, footer sign-offs. Small, but unmistakably us.

How to treat them

They're vector SVGs in Soft Ink at /public/ears/ear-XX.svg — they scale from a bullet to a wall without going fuzzy.

Design decisions.

Design decisions, continued.