Investing in Africa's
secondary regions.
A finance brand with a literary warmth.
Sabou invests in and supports high-growth, tech-enabled SMEs across secondary regions in Central and West Africa, with a gender lens. The system is cool, institutional and trustworthy — built on the logo's blue and navy, a literary serif for warmth, and a calm, hairline-driven layout.
What guides the work.
Logo
The swirling concentric mark in the blue→navy gradient. Use the full lockup where space allows; the icon alone in tight spots. Never recolour or redraw it.
Color
Sampled from the logo. Brand blues lead; a cool grey-blue neutral ramp carries the UI; semantic colour is reserved for health status.
Brand
Neutrals
Health bands — semantic
Typography
Three families: Spectral (serif) for display & warmth, Hanken Grotesk (sans) for all UI, Geist Mono for every number, ID and currency figure.
Display — Spectral serif
UI — Hanken Grotesk sans
Numeric — Geist Mono
Spacing & radius
4px base grid. Soft-but-not-pill radii. Cool navy-tinted shadows, used sparingly for elevation.
Spacing scale
Radius & shadow
Iconography
A lightweight inline-SVG set: 1.5px stroke, 24px grid, rounded joins, currentColor. Minimal and functional — status is shown with dots, never glyphs. No emoji.
Badges & health
Compact status — health bands, instrument tags, counts. Tones map to the semantic palette plus accent, neutral and ink.
Forms
Cool grey border at rest, brand-blue ring on focus. Numeric values use the mono face so figures align.
Cards & surfaces
White fill, hairline border, soft shadow. Interactive cards raise on hover. Health cards add a coloured left border.
Voice & tone
Plain, precise, institutional but human. Sentence case. No emoji. Real numbers over vague adjectives.
| Principle | Do | Don't |
|---|---|---|
| Plain words | "operating guides", "bank sign-in" | "runbooks", "OAuth flow" |
| Concrete | "Revenue –18% vs target" | "underperforming" |
| Casing | "Add deal", "Fund overview" | "Add Deal", "FUND OVERVIEW" |
| Confidence | "AI proposes. Humans decide." | "Revolutionary AI-powered…" |
Sabou OS
The investment-operations platform, composed entirely from the tokens and components above. Full interactive build lives in the project's app.
Live tokens in
styles.css; components under components/; product recreation under ui_kits/.