Brand GuideVolume One
Continuum Physiotherapy and Rehab

The body is a continuum.
So is the care.

Identity · Colour · Type · Voice Prepared for Continuum Physiotherapy & Rehab
Continuum — Brand Guide02

What's inside

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 — Brand Essence03

Recovery isn't a finish line.

Brand description

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.

The one-line idea

Care that doesn't end when the pain does.

Personality

We areNot
PreciseClinical
DirectBlunt
ComposedCold
OpinionatedPreachy
WarmSoft

The rebellion

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.

Continuum — Positioning04

A studio that happens to be excellent at medicine.

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.

Positioning statement

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.

Who this brand attracts

  • The high-performing professional. 32–55. Desk-bound, weekend-athletic, time-poor. Buys competence and calendar certainty.
  • The serious amateur athlete. Marathon, triathlon, climbing, lifting. Wants a practitioner who understands load, not just pain.
  • The post-surgical rebuilder. Discharged from the system, undertrained, quietly frightened. Needs a plan and a person.
  • The long-view client. Perimenopause, ageing parents, forty-year horizon. Buying capacity, not a cure.
  • The referrer. Surgeons, coaches, GPs, corporate HR. Sends people here because the reporting is rigorous.

Who it doesn't

Discount seekers, single-session sceptics, and anyone shopping on price per hour. The brand should quietly repel them. That's a feature.

Continuum — Logo05

The logo is fixed.

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.

Do

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.

Don't

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.

Continuum logo with clear space

Dashed line indicates minimum clear space. Nothing — type, image edge, button, badge — enters this field.

Continuum — Colour06

Two colours from the logo. Ten built around them.

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.

01 / Core — taken from the logo, unchanged

Ember
#F58634
The signal. One moment per layout: a call to action, a rule, a key figure. Never a background for body copy, never more than ~5% of a surface.
Continuum Blue
#006CB5
The structural colour. Links, active states, data, section markers, anatomical illustration. Clinical credibility lives here.
Graphite
#373435
Body text on light grounds, and the wordmark's own colour. A true warm-neutral dark — use it instead of black everywhere.

02 / Grounds — the surfaces everything sits on

Midnight
#041824
Full-bleed covers, film, packaging, the back of a business card. Depth, not black.
Deep Marine
#06263B
The working dark. Hero sections, deck dividers, studio walls, signage.
Saline
#E7E9E4
The paper. Long-form reading, proposals, interiors. Warmer than grey, cleaner than cream.
Ice
#DCE7EE
Pale blue field. Table rows, cards, form panels, illustration ground.

03 / Warm range — Ember, made workable

Copper
#C1601D
Small orange text, hover states, uncoated print. Use wherever Ember fails contrast.
Umber
#7E3A12
Deep warm dark. Text on Sand, warning states, spine and edge printing.
Sand
#EFDCC6
The soft field. Treatment-room textiles, membership collateral, quiet Instagram cards.

04 / Cool range & metal

Slate
#4E6E85
Muted blue. Secondary buttons, borders, chart series two, disabled states.
Mist
#A9C3D6
Secondary text on Marine, chart fills, duotone highlights, illustration shading.
Brass
#A88A4E
Print and object only — foil, edge gilding, membership cards, door furniture. Never on screen.
Continuum — Colour in use07

Ratio is the whole discipline.

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.

52% Saline / white / Ice 24% Marine / Midnight 12% Graphite 5% 4% 3%

Warm range and metal sit outside this ratio — they are applied to whole objects and surfaces, not mixed into layouts.

Functional colours

Verdigris
#2E7D6B
Booking confirmed, programme complete, progress met.
Claret
#8E2C3B
Cancellation, error, contraindication. Never Ember — Ember is a welcome, not an alarm.

Two functional colours only, both desaturated enough to sit beside the core without competing. They appear in interface and clinical documents, never in marketing.

Neutral ladder

100
70
45
20
8

#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.

Contrast pairings

Graphite on SalineBody copy
Mist on MarineSecondary copy
Ember on MarineHeadlines, buttons
Copper on whiteSmall orange text
Umber on SandWarm collateral
Ember on white24 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.

Continuum — Typefaces08

No serif. Anywhere.

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.

Display — PP Right Grotesk, Compact cuts
Movement
as practice

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.

Text — ABC Diatype
Assessment, treatment and a plan that outlives the pain.

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.

Data — ABC Diatype Mono
SESSION 04 / LOAD PHASE
ROM 118° · WK 06/12

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.

Continuum — Type scale09

The scale

Nine steps on a 1.25 ratio from a 16 px base. Nothing is set at a size that isn't on this list.

StepFace & settingSize / leadingRule
D1 — StatementDisplay, 700, width 7696–140 px / 0.94Covers and heroes only. One per document. Tracking −3.2%. Break lines by meaning; a second weight or Copper marks the emphasised phrase.
D2 — HeadlineDisplay, 700, width 7656–96 px / 0.96One per page. Maximum three lines. Never centred, never all-caps.
H1 — SectionDisplay, 650, width 8032–52 px / 1.02Maximum 16 characters per line. Tracking −2.6%.
H2 — SubsectionText, 600, width 10020–24 px / 1.3Sentence case. Sits directly on the paragraph it opens — no rule between.
L — LabelMono, 600, uppercase10–12 px / 1.4Tracking +7%. Blue on light, Mist on dark. One line only.
P1 — LedeText, 40019–22 px / 1.5Two to four sentences. Sets the argument; the body proves it.
P2 — BodyText, 40016–18 px / 1.6Measure 58–66 characters. Left aligned, never justified.
P3 — CaptionText, 400, or Mono for figures12–13 px / 1.5Graphite 70 or Mist. Captions carry real information — the movement, the phase, the week.
C — Call to actionText, 60015–16 pxEmber 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.

Continuum — Setting rules10

Tracking is the tell.

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.

Tracking

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%

Numerals

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.

Case & punctuation

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.

Setting

  • Left aligned. Ragged right, never justified, never hyphenated.
  • Measure 58–66 characters. Below 45, break the column; above 75, it stops being read.
  • No widows and no orphans in display type. Break lines manually.
  • A paragraph is never centred beyond three lines.
  • Optical alignment on all hanging punctuation.
  • Never fake a weight, a width, an italic or a small cap.

Minimums

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.

Continuum — Type in application11

Same system, five pressures.

The scale doesn't change by channel. What changes is which steps are allowed, and how much air sits around them.

ContextSteps in playThe constraint
Studio signageH1, LMono for wayfinding and room names. Display for one statement on one wall.
WebsiteD2 → CHero at D2, one CTA at C, everything else at P2. No type animation.
Pitch deckD2, H1, L, P1One idea per slide. Evidence in mono beneath the headline. No paragraphs.
ProposalH1 → P3No display type. Prices and timelines in mono, tabular, unembarrassed.
Clinical documentsH2, P2, P3, monoLegibility outranks everything. 16 px minimum, Graphite on white.
InstagramD2 or L, nothing betweenEither one enormous line or one small mono label. Mid-sized type on a square reads as an advert.

Do

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.

Don't

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.

Continuum — Visual language12

Clinical precision, styled like a magazine.

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.

Layout

  • A 12-column grid, used asymmetrically. Content sits on 7 columns; the remaining 5 stay empty on purpose.
  • Margins are generous and consistent — 8% of page width minimum. Whitespace is the most expensive material here.
  • Left-aligned throughout. Centred type only on a cover or a single-statement page.
  • An 8 pt spacing system. Sections separated by multiples of 48.
  • Hairline rules at 1 px, only where they separate two kinds of information.
  • One idea per surface. If a page has two arguments, it's two pages.

Image treatment

  • Photograph real practitioners, real clients, real rooms. No stock.
  • Natural light, single source, deep shadow. Warm-neutral grade, true skin tones, no blue medical cast.
  • Crop close — a shoulder, a hand on a knee, a foot mid-stride. Bodies as form, never as anxiety.
  • Full-bleed or hard-edged rectangles. No rounded corners, no drop shadows, no floating cut-outs.
  • Duotone in Marine and Ember for texture pages and dividers only — sparingly, never on faces.
  • 3–5% film grain on hero imagery. It should read as paper, not as a filter.

Composition

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.

Continuum — Graphic system13

Two devices. That's the whole kit.

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.

The Arc

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.

The Split Field

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.

Also permitted

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.

Continuum — Applications14

How it behaves in the wild

Instagram

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.

Pitch decks

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.

Proposals & corporate offers

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.

Website

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.

Client case studies

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 studio itself

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.

Continuum — Voice15

Speak like the best practitioner in the room.

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.

Ten lines in the voice

  • Care that doesn't end when the pain does.
  • Your body isn't a problem to be closed.
  • Forty minutes. One practitioner. No queue.
  • We treat the cause, then we build the capacity.
  • Rest is a phase, not a plan.
  • Strong enough for the life you actually live.
  • Physiotherapy for people who intend to keep going.
  • Most backs don't need a scan. They need a programme.
  • Discharge is a beginning we take seriously.
  • Book an assessment. Leave with a plan.

Five things the brand should say

  • Name the mechanism. “Your hamstring is under-loaded, not torn.”
  • Give a timeline and a measure. “Six weeks. We're tracking single-leg bridge reps.”
  • Be honest about limits. “This is beyond physiotherapy. Here's who you should see.”
  • Credit the client's work. “You built this. We just sequenced it.”
  • Take a position. “We don't do passive-only treatment. It doesn't hold.”

Five things the brand should never say

  • “Your wellness journey.” Nobody in pain calls it a journey.
  • “Unlock your best self.” Empty, and borrowed from a supplement ad.
  • “Pain-free in 3 days — guaranteed!” Bodies aren't guaranteed. Ever.
  • “We're passionate about helping people.” Everyone says it; it proves nothing.
  • “Just relax and let us fix you.” Passive, patronising, and clinically wrong.

Mechanics

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 — Creative direction16

The direction, in one paragraph.

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.

Do this first

  • Commission a real photography day. It's the highest-leverage spend in the whole identity.
  • License PP Right Grotesk and ABC Diatype. Instrument Sans holds the line, but the licensed cuts are what separate the tier.
  • Rewrite the website hero and the booking flow before touching anything else.
  • Fix the studio's lighting and signage. The room is the brand.
  • Publish four case studies with actual numbers in them.

Hold the line on

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.

The verdict

Build it cold, set it enormous, and spend the orange once.

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.