Private access
Enter the password to view this guide.
A working document. Every page answers one question a designer, writer or partner will ask before they make something in this brand's name.
Continuum is a physiotherapy and rehabilitation studio for people who intend to keep using their bodies — hard, and for a long time. We work in the space between injury and ambition: assessment that is genuinely diagnostic, hands-on treatment, and a training plan that outlives the pain. No queue. No paper gown. No twelve-week discharge letter. One practitioner, one plan, one relationship that carries on after you stop limping.
Care that doesn't end when the pain does.
| We are | Not |
|---|---|
| Precise | Clinical |
| Direct | Blunt |
| Composed | Cold |
| Opinionated | Preachy |
| Warm | Soft |
Physio has been sold as damage control — something you buy once, resent paying for, and hope never to need again. Continuum treats it as maintenance for a body you plan to keep. That reframe is the whole brand. Everything in this document exists to make it feel obvious.
The category default is the clinic: fluorescent, functional, forgettable. Continuum is positioned one shelf higher — closer to a private training studio or a serious wellness membership than to a treatment room, without giving up an ounce of clinical credibility. Premium is earned through time, expertise and space, never through marble and adjectives.
For people whose bodies are part of how they live and earn, Continuum is the physiotherapy studio that treats recovery as a practice rather than a prescription — combining specialist clinical assessment with the environment, time and continuity of a private studio.
Discount seekers, single-session sceptics, and anyone shopping on price per hour. The brand should quietly repel them. That's a feature.
No redraw, no recolour, no re-set, no condensed variant, no added tagline lock-up. The mark and wordmark are supplied as-is and reproduced as-is. Everything else in this guide is built to serve it.
Place on white or on a white plate when the background is Marine or Ember.
Maintain clear space equal to the height of the mark on all four sides.
Minimum widths: 32 mm print, 180 px screen. Below that, use the mark alone.
Let it sit small. Confidence is a logo you don't have to enlarge.
Change the orange or blue, apply gradients, outlines, shadows or glows.
Stretch, rotate, crop, animate the loop, or separate the mark from the wordmark within a lock-up.
Set it over a busy photograph or a mid-tone. Contrast or nothing.
Recreate the wordmark in the system fonts. It is a drawing, not a text field.
Dashed line indicates minimum clear space. Nothing — type, image edge, button, badge — enters this field.
Orange and blue are loud together. The extended palette's job is to give them somewhere to stand: deep grounds, a stone paper, a warm range and a cool range that let Ember and Blue be signals rather than a scheme. Nothing here dilutes the logo — it isolates it.
A palette this size only works if the proportions hold. Ember never exceeds Blue; Blue never exceeds the neutrals. If a layout starts to look like a sports poster, the ratio has slipped — not the colours.
Warm range and metal sit outside this ratio — they are applied to whole objects and surfaces, not mixed into layouts.
Two functional colours only, both desaturated enough to sit beside the core without competing. They appear in interface and clinical documents, never in marketing.
#373435 · #6B6866 · #A3A09E · #D6D3CF · #F1EFEC. Captions at 70, rules and borders at 20, table stripes at 8. Nothing in the interface is pure grey and nothing is pure black.
| Graphite on Saline | Body copy |
| Mist on Marine | Secondary copy |
| Ember on Marine | Headlines, buttons |
| Copper on white | Small orange text |
| Umber on Sand | Warm collateral |
| Ember on white | 24 px up only |
Never put Ember directly on Blue. Two saturated primaries touching is exactly what makes physio brands look like energy drinks. Separate them with Marine, Saline, Ice or white every time.
The 5% rule. One Ember element per view — a button, or a headline word, or a rule. Not all three. When everything is emphasised, the brand reads anxious rather than confident.
Production. Pantone to be matched on press: Ember ≈ 1585 C, Blue ≈ 3005 C, Marine ≈ 5395 C, Sand ≈ 7501 C, Brass ≈ 871 C metallic.
A serif was the wrong instinct — it imports heritage, and heritage is the opposite of what this brand is arguing. Continuum is a body-performance practice, not an old institution. The system is now two contemporary grotesques and nothing else: cold, engineered, current. The premium comes from scale, spacing and restraint, not from decoration.
Tall, narrow, mechanically drawn, with flat-sided curves and no softness at any joint. Released 2020 and it looks it — this is contemporary type, not a revival. Set enormous, tracked to −3%, weight 700 against weight 400 in the same line.
Alternatives: Druk Text for more force; ABC Marfa Condensed for more strangeness.
Free: Instrument Sans at width 76, weight 700 — used for every headline in this document.
Tight apertures, narrow proportions, zero warmth. It sets dense clinical detail at small sizes without ever sounding friendly or apologetic. Regular and Medium; Semibold for interface only.
Alternatives: Suisse Int'l; PP Neue Montreal.
Free: Instrument Sans at width 100 — the same family as the display, differentiated only by width and scale.
Fixed widths, mechanical, always small. Rep counts, weeks, degrees of range, prices, session codes, signage, navigation, captions on clinical imagery. A column of numbers that aligns is the most convincing thing this brand can put on a page.
Alternatives: Söhne Mono; GT America Mono.
Free: Spline Sans Mono — used for every label and figure here.
Why cold works here. Warmth in a health brand reads as reassurance, and reassurance reads as cheap. Cold type says the assessment will be accurate and the timeline will be honest. The warmth in Continuum comes from photography and from named practitioners — never from a typeface.
Against the wordmark. The logotype is wide, geometric and even. The display face is narrow, tall and tight. Contrast on the width axis means the two never compete, and the logo stays the widest thing on any page.
Non-negotiables. No serif, no script, no rounded sans, no slab. Two families and no more. The wordmark's typeface is not part of this system and never sets copy.
Nine steps on a 1.25 ratio from a 16 px base. Nothing is set at a size that isn't on this list.
| Step | Face & setting | Size / leading | Rule |
|---|---|---|---|
| D1 — Statement | Display, 700, width 76 | 96–140 px / 0.94 | Covers and heroes only. One per document. Tracking −3.2%. Break lines by meaning; a second weight or Copper marks the emphasised phrase. |
| D2 — Headline | Display, 700, width 76 | 56–96 px / 0.96 | One per page. Maximum three lines. Never centred, never all-caps. |
| H1 — Section | Display, 650, width 80 | 32–52 px / 1.02 | Maximum 16 characters per line. Tracking −2.6%. |
| H2 — Subsection | Text, 600, width 100 | 20–24 px / 1.3 | Sentence case. Sits directly on the paragraph it opens — no rule between. |
| L — Label | Mono, 600, uppercase | 10–12 px / 1.4 | Tracking +7%. Blue on light, Mist on dark. One line only. |
| P1 — Lede | Text, 400 | 19–22 px / 1.5 | Two to four sentences. Sets the argument; the body proves it. |
| P2 — Body | Text, 400 | 16–18 px / 1.6 | Measure 58–66 characters. Left aligned, never justified. |
| P3 — Caption | Text, 400, or Mono for figures | 12–13 px / 1.5 | Graphite 70 or Mist. Captions carry real information — the movement, the phase, the week. |
| C — Call to action | Text, 600 | 15–16 px | Ember fill, Marine text. Square or 2 px radius. Verb first, outcome named: “Book an assessment”, not “Learn more”. One primary per screen. |
Vertical rhythm. An 8 pt baseline. Space above a heading is always double the space below it — that single rule does more for perceived quality than any other setting in this document.
Large type set at default tracking is the single clearest sign that no one made a decision. Every size in this system has a tracking value, and it moves in the opposite direction to the size.
| 96 px and above | −3.2% |
| 56–96 px | −3.0% |
| 32–52 px | −2.6% |
| 20–24 px | −1.8% |
| 16–18 px body | −1.4% |
| 12–13 px caption | −0.6% |
| Mono labels | +7% |
Tabular lining figures in every table, price list, programme and clinical note — figures must align vertically or the rigour is undermined. Proportional figures in running text only. Degrees, weeks and loads are always numerals, never words: “6 weeks”, “118°”, “42.5 kg”. Units spelled out at first use, abbreviated after.
Sentence case everywhere except mono labels. No all-caps display type — at these weights and widths it becomes a slogan. En dashes for ranges, spaced em dashes never. Serial comma. No exclamation marks in owned copy. Apostrophes and quotes always typographic.
Body never below 15 px on screen or 8.5 pt in print. Mono labels never below 10 px. Display never below 32 px — at smaller sizes the narrow width closes up and becomes illegible.
The scale doesn't change by channel. What changes is which steps are allowed, and how much air sits around them.
| Context | Steps in play | The constraint |
|---|---|---|
| Studio signage | H1, L | Mono for wayfinding and room names. Display for one statement on one wall. |
| Website | D2 → C | Hero at D2, one CTA at C, everything else at P2. No type animation. |
| Pitch deck | D2, H1, L, P1 | One idea per slide. Evidence in mono beneath the headline. No paragraphs. |
| Proposal | H1 → P3 | No display type. Prices and timelines in mono, tabular, unembarrassed. |
| Clinical documents | H2, P2, P3, mono | Legibility outranks everything. 16 px minimum, Graphite on white. |
| D2 or L, nothing between | Either one enormous line or one small mono label. Mid-sized type on a square reads as an advert. |
Let one line of D1 hold an entire surface, with a single mono label as its only company.
Use weight and width — not colour — as the first tool for hierarchy.
Set numbers in mono every time they mean something clinical.
Leave the bottom half of a cover empty if the line is strong enough.
Set display type in all caps, or letterspace it to fill a width.
Stack three type sizes in one block — that's a poster, not a system.
Put display type over a photograph without a solid field behind it.
Use mono for anything longer than one line.
Introduce a serif for “warmth”. The photography does that job.
The style is editorial minimalism with one deliberate act of nerve per piece — an oversized crop, a headline running to the trim, a single Ember field. Everything else is restrained to the point of severity. The tension between the two is the brand.
Big, quiet, then one sharp move. Scale contrast does the work: a 100 px headline against 13 px captions, an image at 70% of the page against a single line of type. Never fill a corner just because it's empty.
Restraint is what makes a system recognisable. Continuum owns exactly two graphic assets beyond the logo, and neither is derived from it closely enough to compete with it.
A single open curve, drawn at 1–2 px, repeated in Ember, Blue and Mist. It reads as range of motion, as a rep, as a horizon. Used as a page divider, a section opener, a chart axis, or scaled huge and cropped as background texture at 15% opacity. Never closed into a loop — that's the logo's job.
A hard vertical or horizontal division of a surface into two unequal blocks — typically Marine and Saline at a 62/38 split. It carries the before/after, load/recover, assess/train logic of the practice without a single icon. Use it for covers, deck dividers, Instagram carousels and appointment cards.
Line-drawn anatomical illustration in Blue on Saline — accurate, unshaded, single weight. Nothing else. No icon sets, no abstract blobs, no gradient meshes, no 3D renders, no wellness clip-art of leaves or water.
A grid built in threes: one full-bleed body crop, one Split Field type card, one piece of genuine practitioner knowledge. Marine and Saline alternate down the feed so the grid reads as a rhythm from the profile view. Captions are written, not hashtagged — three lines maximum, one idea. Reels are quiet: ambient room sound, no trending audio, no dancing, no on-screen arrows. Stories carry the informal register; the grid never does.
16:9. Marine dividers between three or four acts, Saline for content. One idea per slide, headline in display serif, evidence in the accent face beneath. Charts in Blue and Mist with a single Ember highlight on the number that matters. No slide is a wall of bullets; if it needs paragraphs, it belongs in the leave-behind.
A4 portrait, Saline paper, wide outer margin holding captions and figures. Cover is a Split Field with the client's name set in display serif. Pricing tables in the accent face with tabular figures — legible, unembarrassed, no strike-through discounting. Signed off by a named practitioner, with their photograph. Premium is accountability, made visible.
A Marine hero with one sentence and one CTA — “Book an assessment”. Below it, evidence: practitioners, method, outcomes. Generous vertical rhythm, no carousel, no pop-up, no chat bubble. Booking is two clicks from anywhere. Motion is limited to a single page-load reveal on the hero; everything else responds only to the visitor.
Structured as three acts — presentation, intervention, capacity. Named where consented, anonymised with a role and an age where not. Include real numbers: weeks, loads, degrees of range, return-to-sport dates. One portrait, one detail shot, one pull quote in the client's words. Never a before/after body comparison.
The most important brand asset is the room. Marine walls, warm task lighting, timber and matte metal, one Ember object. Signage in the accent face. No pamphlet racks, no laminated posters, no pharmaceutical branding, no daytime television.
Calm, specific, faintly amused. Explains without condescending, has a view and states it, uses plain words for complicated things. Short sentences carry the weight. The brand never shouts, because it has never needed to.
Sentence case everywhere. Serial comma. Numerals for anything measurable. No exclamation marks. No emoji in owned copy. Say “client”, not “patient”; “assessment”, not “consultation”; “programme”, not “treatment plan”.
Continuum should look like a serious independent studio that publishes as well as it treats — deep marine grounds, stone-white paper, a narrow grotesque set enormous and tight, real photography of real bodies in real rooms, and orange used once per surface like a struck match. The clinical rigour is proven through specificity: named practitioners, real numbers, honest timelines. The premium is proven through restraint: fewer elements, more space, better paper. Nothing about it should look like a clinic, and nothing about it should look like a spa either.
The single strategic move is the reframe from repair to practice. Every asset should assume the client is coming back — not because something went wrong again, but because this is how they maintain a body they intend to keep.
The 5% Ember rule. Sentence case. Left alignment. No stock photography, no icon sets, no discount language. These five constraints are doing most of the work.
Cold editorial minimalism on a deep marine ground, with the logo's own two colours held apart by discipline rather than blended into a palette. Premium here is not decoration — it's time, space, specificity and nerve. Give the brand fewer things to say and more room to say them, and Continuum stops competing with clinics on price and starts competing with private studios on standard.