Brand
Who Home Assistant is, how it sounds, and how to use its name and logo. For everyone who writes, designs, translates, or talks on behalf of the project.
The Home Assistant brand is more than a blue house with an antenna. It is a personality: how Home Assistant treats people, how it sounds when it explains something, and what it refuses to be. You meet it in a button label, an error message, a page of documentation, a release post, and a reply on the forum.
That is why the brand has its own area. It belongs to everyone who contributes, not just designers:
- Documentation writers, who explain Home Assistant to everyone who uses it
- Developers and designers, who write the text in the interface
- Translators, who carry the same voice into their own language
- Moderators and community members, whose replies are often someone's first contact with the project
- Blog and release notes authors, who tell people what is new
It all starts with what Home Assistant stands for: the Open Home, and its three values of privacy, choice, and sustainability. The personality and the voice follow from those values.
You don't need to learn rules by heart. Read the story and the personality once, and you will recognize it, and notice when something doesn't fit.
- Your first brand contribution: review one page or one piece of interface text against the personality, and improve it.
- Our story and values: the Open Home, its three values, and where Home Assistant comes from.
- Personality: the five traits that describe who Home Assistant is, and what each of them is not.
- Voice and tone: how the personality sounds in documentation, the interface, error messages, community replies, release notes, and social media.
- Name and logo: how to write the name, how to use the logo, and how both relate to the Open Home Foundation.
The brand describes how Home Assistant sounds. The detailed rules for each kind of text live with the people who write it:
- Style guide: the language and formatting rules for the documentation.
- UI text: how the interface talks, with the words to use and avoid.
- Translation rules: what stays the same in every language.
- Welcome newcomers: how to reply to someone who just arrived.
A different kind of brand: integrations have brands too, the logos and names of the companies whose devices Home Assistant connects to. Those live in the integration brands reference of the Core area.
- The personality and logo guidelines live in this area. Suggest a change in the UX design discussions, or with a pull request to this site.
- Questions about design, or the way the interface talks? The #designers channel on the Home Assistant Discord is where designers meet.
- Want to use the logo commercially? Email the Open Home Foundation at [email protected].
- Questions about social media, or an account that pretends to be official? Email the community team at [email protected].