01 — Brand
Who we are, on a page.
AI Qadam isn't a brand bolted on top of a project — it's the visible edge of a community of practitioners building AI in Central Asia. Everything in this system serves that. Qadam means a step forward in the Turkic languages; the mark is one.
Identity
The AI community infrastructure for Central Asia.
Let's make a Qadam toward trust.
#AIQadam
Logo
Theme-adaptive SVG — heads up.
The full lockup carries a theme switch inside the file: letters render dark on light surfaces, off-white on dark; the footprint stays teal. The download is the same file in both themes — what you see depends on where you open it (browser, Figma, Preview each render the fallback differently). For print, partner decks, or any context that needs a fixed colour, open the SVG in Figma or Illustrator and bake the .aiq-logo-dark fill to the colour you need before exporting.
Don't recolour. The mark is the brand teal — anything else reads as a different organisation.
Don't stretch, skew, or rotate. Use the SVG; it scales without loss.
Don't add shadows, glows, gradients, or outlines. The mark is flat.
Don't crop the four dots. They're part of the silhouette, not decoration.
Don't substitute the wordmark with a different typeface — it is the SVG, not Geist.
Don't place the mark on busy imagery. Let it sit on a flat surface with breathing room.
Brand colour
Voice & principles
01
Honesty over hype
No promoting what doesn't exist or lacks real expert backing. Honesty over loud promises.
02
Practice over theory
Speakers share what they did themselves. A real case beats a polished framework.
03
Quality over reach
We measure usefulness, not turnout. 80 engaged people matter more than 500 indifferent ones.
04
The right to fail
We talk about failures openly. An honest post-mortem teaches more than a success story.
05
Community, not channel
Partners invest in people and the community. We're not an advertising venue.
06
Multilingual by default
We speak the languages of the region — state languages, Russian, English — and respect each member's choice.
07
People first
The community exists for the benefit of its participants, not for monetising them through outside interests.
Writing the name
In prose
AI Qadam
Title case. Two words. The Q in Qadam is hard, like in Qazaq.
In the lockup
AI QADAM
All caps, locked together with the mark. Only inside the logo — never in body copy.
Hashtag
#AIQadam
One token, camel case. Used on every public post.
Don't
AI-Qadam · AIQadam · ai qadam · AI Kadam
Hyphens, mashed-up casing, lowercase and phonetic spellings are all out.
02 — Colour palette
Colour, by surface and role.
Brand teal is the only colour with brand meaning. Everything else is a neutral scale plus four semantic accents (success, warning, destructive, live). Tokens are normative — don't invent new ones.
Color tokens
Surface
Brand & semantic
Badge tiers & streak
03 — Typography
Three families, one voice.
Geist for display (titles, hero, brand). Inter for everything you read in a paragraph. JetBrains Mono for technical detail (times, IDs, tags). Both Cyrillic and Latin must read equally well — Central Asia uses both.
Type scale
04 — Photography
Real rooms, real people.
Photography for AI Qadam is documentary, not staged. Real speakers mid-sentence, real laptops, real Q&A hands going up. Avoid stock-AI tropes (blue circuit brains, white robots, glowing data orbs). The honesty principle applies to images too.
No AI-generated humans, robots, brain graphics, or glowing-data backgrounds.
No corporate handshake shots, staged smiles, or empty boardroom posing.
No heavy filters, vignettes, or duotone overlays — keep the colour honest.
No watermarks. Photographer credit goes in caption, not on the image.
Coming soon — curated photo bank for chapter leads & partners.
After Meetup #2 (June 20, 2026) we'll publish the first batch. Until then, ask the country lead for raw assets.
05 — Iconography
Lucide line · brand teal for accents.
Product UI uses Lucide at 2px stroke, 24×24 viewBox. For brand surfaces (decks, merch, posters) the footprint-with-dots motif from the logo is the only allowed pictogram — never duplicate it; never substitute it.
Don't fill brand-mark dots into other icons. The four-dot motif lives in the logo only.
Don't mix icon families. Lucide everywhere; never Heroicons + Phosphor + Lucide in one surface.
Don't recolour icons. Inherit currentColor from text.
06 — Merch templates
Wearables, swag, print.
What AI Qadam chapters hand out at events: a shopper, a notebook, a pen. Funded by partners as a community contribution, distributed free at meetups — never sold.
Want your own AI Qadam merch — for your chapter, your study group, a personal tote? Go ahead. We don't restrict the format; we only ask that the identity travels intact. Non-commercial use only — selling anything that carries the mark, the wordmark, or the brand teal isn't allowed, by anyone. See the Brand Usage Policy.
Template
Shopper
Natural cream-canvas tote with long shoulder straps. Full lockup printed on one face — footprint mark in teal, wordmark in dark below. The opposite face stays bare.
Template
Notebook
Spiral-bound soft-cover notebook in white or kraft. Full lockup centred on the front cover — mark in teal, wordmark in dark below. Twin-loop wire binding on the left, folds flat for note-taking.
Template
Pen
Matte-white click barrel with a chrome push-button, clip, and a slim accent ring at the centre. Wordmark printed vertically along the upper barrel in dark; the footprint mark sits below in brand teal. No taglines, no slogans.
Making your own?
Use the SVG straight from brand/logo-full.svg or brand/logo-mark.svg — no redrawing, no recolouring, no AI-generated variants. Brand teal prints as Pantone 7716 C for safe colour-matching across suppliers. Paying a vendor to produce a one-off is fine; selling the result isn't — the bag is free, the brand isn't for sale.
07 — Decks & speaker templates
Speakers, fork this.
Two starting points for anyone speaking at an AI Qadam meetup: a PPTX you can open in PowerPoint / Keynote / Google Slides, and an HTML deck that's editable in any text editor — and AI-friendly so you can ask Claude/ChatGPT to draft your slides directly into it.
Both share the same six-slide skeleton: title · speaker bio · section divider · content · quote · closing. Brand visual language (teal, four-dot motif, wordmark) is baked in. Don't override.
Speaker deck · PPTX
16:9, six skeleton slides, brand teal + Inter throughout. Open in PowerPoint, Keynote, or Google Slides; fill in the placeholders.
brand/decks/aiqadam-speaker-template.pptx
Download PPTX
Speaker deck · HTML
Same skeleton, served live in the browser. Edit any <section data-kind="..."> block to author a slide. Keyboard nav (← → space) and a print mode for PDF export. AI-friendly: each slide is a self-contained semantic block.
Don't recolour the wordmark or the four dots. Teal lives on --primary; everything else is neutral.
Don't use AI-generated imagery. Photos must be real — see Photography.
Don't substitute the display family. Geist for headings, Inter for body, JetBrains Mono for meta.
Don't bury the speaker. Name + role on slide 2 is non-negotiable.
Don't pitch a product on a community meetup deck. See Brand Usage Policy — partners contribute, they don't advertise.
Don't drift the eyebrow. Always AI Qadam · <context> in JetBrains Mono caps.