How Gornitsa looks

A gornitsa is the clean, bright room of a Russian wooden house where guests were welcomed. The brand draws on three images from that world.

• Linen — bleached cloth as the ground for everything: light, quiet, plenty of air.
• Thread and cross-stitch — embroidery as the unit of drawing: the mark, the ornament and the canvas cells are all built from cross-stitches. Red (kumach) and spruce threads lead; flax thread is for decoration.
• Order — like a gornitsa, where everything has its place: an even grid, a calm rhythm, nothing extra on screen.

What the brand never uses: fake-antique curlicues everywhere, gold and gloss, nesting dolls, balalaikas, bears and other souvenir clichés, neon and acid “gamer” colours, glossy 3D buttons.

• In Russian — Горница, written in text as студия «Горница» in «guillemets» and declined as a normal noun.
• In English — Gornitsa (Gornitsa Studio), without quotation marks.
• In the logo the name is set in Kurale with a capital first letter, no letter-spacing and no all-caps.
• Domain — gornitsa.games; game package names — games.gornitsa.<game>.

• Mark and name (as in the site header): the mark on the left, the name “Горница” in Kurale on the right; the mark is about the height of a capital letter including descenders, with half the mark’s width between them.
• Clear space — one cell of the mark’s grid (1/7 of its width) on every side.
• Smallest size — 16 px, as in a browser tab; any smaller and the stitches run together.
• Ground — linen or paper; on dark grounds the mark takes the dark-theme colours. On photos and busy pictures, only on a linen-coloured panel.
• Single colour — where two colours aren’t possible: embossing, one-ink printing, watermarks. The colour is ink, red or white.
• Never rotate it (the diamond stands on its point), stretch it, swap the thread colours, add shadows, outlines, gradients or depth, draw the stitches in another shape, or put the mark inside a game icon.

Text contrast: ink and soft ink on linen and paper — at least 7 : 1; red on linen — 5.8 : 1 (fine for text from 17 px and for buttons); white on red — 6.8 : 1. The dark theme is checked the same way. Exact colour values for both themes are in the tokens file (below, “Files”).

A game’s own palette adds to these colours rather than replacing the interface: Skazy adds ochre, blue, soot, white and a little gold to the threads, Uzory adds its embroidery-thread palette. Buttons, dialogs, menu backgrounds and text in games use the studio colours.

• Kurale — headings, game names, the studio name, quotations. Weight 400 only, from 21 px up. Not for buttons, captions or body text.
• Onest — everything else: text, buttons, captions, numbers. Weights 400, 500 and 600; figures in columns are tabular.
• Both fonts are under the SIL Open Font License. The site and the games serve them from their own server; for print, get them by name from any free-font catalogue.
• Body text uses the middle step of the type scale with 1.6 line spacing; headings use 1.12 line spacing with balanced line lengths.
• A game may have its own display face — for example for the titles of tales — by its art director’s decision; the interface stays in Onest.

• The cross-stitch is the unit of drawing: two short lines with rounded ends at 45° inside a square cell with margins.
• The embroidered band is a strip of red and spruce cross-stitches on paper between two thin lines. On the site it sits above the footer; in games, in “About” and on section screens, never more than one band per screen.
• The canvas is a field of cells with thin gaps, where a picture can be “stitched”, as on the site’s home page and in Uzory.
• Ornament is drawn in code, on a grid, from geometric motifs of northern Russian embroidery: diamonds, fir-trees, crosses, steps. No symbols whose meaning we can’t explain and check against a source.
• Ornament decorates edges, never backgrounds: text never sits on a pattern.

• Flat and drawn in code. Fills without shading, a crisp outline or none, a limited palette. Game characters and objects are drawn in code from parts.
• Photographs — only our own or public-domain ones, with no fake-antique filters and no close-ups of present-day people.
• Never — AI-generated images, stock pictures, 3D renders, gloss or casino-style gradients.

• Corner radii: buttons and fields — 6 px, cards — 10 px, tags and thread pickers — fully round. Shadows are almost never used: surfaces are separated by the paper colour and a thin line.
• The primary button is red with white text; the secondary one is transparent with a border. One primary button per screen.
• Keyboard focus — a 2 px red outline with an offset.
• Touch targets are at least 48 × 48: big buttons are part of the promise that a grandmother can play.
• Calm motion: short transitions with no springs or shaking; when animation is turned off on the phone, the games and the site keep still too.
• Our own calm confirmation dialog in the studio colours instead of the system one.

Each game has its own look: Votchina — board-game cards, Long Nardy — board and dice, Anamnesis — a calm hospital, Skazy — Russian folk prints and Bilibin, Uzory — embroidery. The studio brand is what they share.

1. Interface — background, text, buttons, dialogs, menus — in the studio colours and in Kurale and Onest.
2. Cross-stitch and thread — list markers, the embroidered band, colour pickers — wherever they suit the game.
3. “About” — the studio mark, the line “A game by Gornitsa studio”, gornitsa.games and support@gornitsa.games, the embroidered band.
4. Store listing — developer “Горница”; the description is written in the studio’s voice.
5. Game icon — no studio mark and no text: one large recognisable object from the game, drawn flat on linen, paper or the game’s own colour; no gradients, frames or highlights. All the icons side by side look like one family.
6. Store screenshots — real game screens; captions in Onest on a band of linen or paper at the top; no invented interface and no exclamation marks.
7. Cover on the site — a picture of the game’s world with no lettering: no title, no slogan, no buttons — the name sits next to it as text. 3 : 1, from 1920 × 640; everything important stays in the middle 2 : 1, since phones crop the edges. The same flat drawing as in the game. The banner with the name stays for the home-page card and social links.
8. No logo splash screen at launch: the game opens straight away, and the studio introduces itself in “About”.

A project in a client’s brand takes the client’s name, colours, type and voice. All that remains of Gornitsa is one line in “About” — “Made by Gornitsa studio”, if the client agrees — and our rules on player data, content and money.