Brand standard · October 2026

Good is practiced, not promised.

Who we are, who we work for, and the marks that sign it, in that order. The logo comes last.

Start with character ↓

Where it started

It’s not enough to make good work, we have to make Good work too.
Robert Duebelbeis · founder, Good Citizens

00 · Discovery

A corporation built around software ventures

Good Citizens is a startup. We build and look after our own ventures, and we help other people build theirs.

This page follows Scott Lerman’s Building Better Brands: discover what’s true, then character, arena, positioning and experience, and only then the identity. Each part rests on the one before it.

What we hold to under pressure

01 · Character

Character is what everything else here is built on. These are the five traits, and what each one makes us do.

Draft · unverified
Honest
We publish what didn’t work, and we say so before you have to ask.
Skeptical
We test an idea against the people it’s for before we believe it, including our own ideas.
Innovative
We use what’s already there in new ways: county parcel data for a landscaping quote, one record for a whole web presence.
Relentless
A trial has a date, and we keep it.
Loyal to our partners
We never win at a partner’s expense. If the deal is bad for you, it’s bad for us.

What we refuse to be

Theatrical
No big reveals and no performance for the room. The work is what we show.
Trendy
We choose what will still be true in ten years over what looks new this year.
The agency
We don’t bill hours to look busy or hand over a deck and walk away.

Who we work for, and who else they could hire

02 · Arena

The people we serve, in order

  1. Small businesses
  2. Civic projects
  3. Early-stage founders

Who else they could choose

Agencies, consultancies, their own in-house team, or a freelancer. The ones we admire are the boutique consultancies: small, senior, and close to the work.

Draft · unverified

Good is practiced, not promised

03 · Positioning

Anyone can call themselves good. We would rather you judge us on what we’ve done, so here is the proof we have so far.

Draft · unverified
Art businesses
An artist’s pricing, galleries and archive brought into one catalogue that sells for her.
Landscapers
TerraQuotes prices a yard from the county’s own parcel data, before anyone drives out.
Trails
A petition to keep Phoenix trails open in the heat, with a digital waiver at the trailhead instead of a closure.
How we build
Low impact, big return. Small, cheap, durable systems that keep paying back.
Where we come from
We started as poor kids who were smart enough to build this stuff ourselves.

Protect Our Trails, First Responders, and Community

Good Citizenship

Help protect first responders and keep trails open with an implied liability waiver and digital acknowledgment system. Together, we can empower everyone to be responsible stewards of these incredible public lands, keep trails accessible, and ensure that taxpayer funds are used for genuine emergencies.

Started in Phoenix in November 2024 and addressed to the Mayor and City Council. Instead of closing trails early on Excessive Heat Warning days, hikers would acknowledge the risk with a QR code at the trailhead, and that acknowledgment would tell the city how the trails are really used.

Join the Petition

Ways to work with us

04 · What we offer

Some of it is free, and all of it starts small.

A free trial of TerraQuotes
Our flagship venture, for residential service operators.
The Usability Harness
Free tools that show what good looks like in software people use.
Consulting engagements
Product thinking and software design, run as trials with a date.
Demos of solutions
A working answer to a market problem, built so you can decide on something real.
New ventures and partnerships
If you have a problem worth a business, we’d like to hear about it.

Where you meet us, and what we want you to say

05 · Experience

Moments

  • This site
  • A Harness bookmark
  • A trial kickoff
  • An email from us
  • An invoice

Each of these opens with our production launch, and we’ll measure them from then.

What we hope to earn · written by us, not testimonials

  1. I just thought we needed to make sure our website was working. Good Citizens has a whole platform designed to keep things cheap, affordable and easy to manage.
  2. We wouldn’t be here without the strategic guidance we needed and the foundational support of Good Citizens.
  3. Unparalleled product thinking and software design, forged by decades of delivering for others.
  4. You know you’re up to something good when you’ve joined the team at Good Citizens. They’ll kill your bad ideas fast and keep you focused on the good ones.
  5. These people will never lie to you or waste a minute of your time. They might also be the utility you need to launch your next venture.
Draft · unverified

The marks, last

06 · Identity
The G adapter · hover, and it becomes GOOD

A record adapter: the part that lets a single play on any turntable. Ours is a G with a c at its hub.

The rim is the G, and its crossbar is the G’s own spur. The hub is the c. Two spokes hold them together, and three low tabs grip the record. The red square in the G’s mouth is the hinge; below 24 pixels it drops out.

The mark signs our work and doesn’t lead it, with one exception: on the homepage, it turns at the centre of the record.

Make Good Work

The word GOOD is built, not typed: the G adapter as its G, an O cut from a square, a screened O with its bar that turns, and a solid D whose bowl carries the hinge. Hover over the mark at the foot of any page and it becomes the word.

Colour, spent by proportion

Field · about 64%

The ground, read as open space. #F5F0EC

Ink · about 18%

The mark, the one diagonal, the volumes. #2D0A3A

Screens · about 10%

Every grey is a line screen of ink, never a tint. ink at 50, 33, 20%

Hinge · 4% or less

Magenta printed over yellow, beside the one action. #FF2600

Signals mean something, so they are never decoration

Purple

Structure: construction, dimensions, numbering. #7B2FBE

Magenta

The signal: the claim. #FF2D87

Yellow

Observation: what was seen or measured. #FFD600

Teal

Consequence: what it costs or causes. #00B8A9

Green

Survived scrutiny. Kept for verdicts that held up. #00C04B

Type

Archivo, for headings

Atkinson Hyperlegible Next, for reading

Atkinson Hyperlegible Mono, for anything that names or measures

Every size comes from one golden-ratio scale. A study of our type sets each one out and explains it.

The drawing rules

  1. Open groundA cream field with no ground line. Things float in it.
  2. One diagonalOne heavy diagonal between 30 and 45 degrees leads the eye.
  3. Two axonometriesVolumes are drawn in one of two fixed projections, so plates agree with each other.
  4. Hairline constructionThe lines that built the drawing stay visible.
  5. Scale contrastSomething large and something tiny, up to one to twenty.
  6. One redThe hinge, in one place, beside the one thing we ask you to do.
  7. Objects are drawn, ideas are builtA real object gets a real technical drawing. An idea gets a Proun.

The grammar comes from El Lissitzky’s Prouns. Movement is rotation and assembly, never bounce, and anything that moves can be paused.

Checked on every build

07 · Checked

The brand is written as code, so it can be checked like code. Before this site is built, three checks read its stylesheets, its plate library and the labels in its drawn scenes. If any rule fails, the build stops and nothing ships until it is fixed.

They check what a machine can measure. Whether a page is any good is still a person’s call, and a check passing is never the reason something ships.

Type and rhythm

scripts/check-rhythm.mjs

  1. Every size, leading and space sits on a 4px lattice.
  2. Reading type sets at the golden ratio, 20 on 32. Headings carry that line’s air, so they set closer the larger they grow.
  3. Text sizes step by the square root of the golden ratio, and two steps make the golden ratio itself.
  4. The reading measure is 21 lines of body leading wide, and reading text is never narrower than 40 characters.
  5. Every size is bound to its own leading, and every line box lands on the lattice.
  6. Nothing enters as a raw value: no pixel sizes, spacing or offsets in any stylesheet or inline style.
  7. Layouts change only at the five named breakpoints.

Plates

scripts/check-plates.ts

  1. Only the six inks. Green is kept for verdicts and never printed.
  2. Magenta is the one action: a plate spends it on two shapes at most.
  3. Teal and yellow never overprint each other.
  4. Every shape stays on the plate, on whole units, in two to twenty-four shapes.
  5. Paper is only ever a knockout.
  6. Motion is quiet: three moving shapes at most, each starting from where it is drawn.

Words in drawn scenes

scripts/check-scenes.mts

  1. Every label in a scene reaches 4.5 : 1 contrast against what is drawn behind it.
  2. Every label is at least 12.5 pixels when the scene is shown at figure size.
  3. A label that sits on a box stays inside it.

Source

Scott Lerman, Building Better Brands: A Comprehensive Guide to Brand Strategy and Identity Development (2013).