Basoa is Basque for forest — where branches, antlers and moss live. It is the visual language of Adar: one mark, a palette named after the woods at night, three typefaces and a graph that everything else grows from.
Shapes branch and taper like living things. Curves are soft, ends are round, nothing is boxy for its own sake.
The history is the hero.
The commit graph is the most important picture. Colour, glow and motion exist to make it readable.
Calm until it matters.
Night-dark surfaces and fog-grey text; fern only where the eye should go. One accent per view.
Basque at heart, open to all.
Names and small details come from euskara; the website speaks English, Spanish and Basque, and the app will too.
02
Logo
A pair of antlers drawn with git lanes. A root commit, one fork, two beams and two tines — and a commit at every tip. Read it as a deer, a branching tree or git log --graph: all three are adar.
Drawn on a 64-unit grid with a single 4.6-unit round stroke. Tips are 4.4-unit commits; the root is slightly larger. Everything is symmetric about the centre lane.
Keep one tip-node (¼ of the mark) free on every side.
Minimum size
Mark from 16 px, lockup from 24 px tall.
Don’t
rotatestretchrecolouradd effects
Keep the mark upright, in proportion, in fern, ink or bone.
03
Colour
Every colour is named in Basque after something in the forest. Night surfaces carry the interface; the accents are used sparingly and always mean the same thing. Click a swatch to copy it.
Neutrals
Semantic tokens
Token
Role
Night
Day
04
Typography
Geist does the work, Instrument Serif brings the feeling, Geist Mono labels the machine. Use the serif italic for one or two words per heading — never for whole paragraphs.
Aa
Geist
--font-sans · 300–700
Interface, headings and body text. Tight tracking on large sizes.
Aa
Instrument Serif Italic
--font-serif · 400
Expressive words in headlines, Basque terms, figure captions.
Aa
Geist Mono
--font-mono · 400–600
Code, SHAs, refs, keyboard shortcuts and eyebrow labels.
display
See your git
3xl
Pick a branch.
2xl
Merge feature/login into main
xl
Stage files, hunks or single lines.
md
Adar drives the git already installed on your Mac, so it works with the credentials you already use.
sm
Destructive actions ask first and can be undone.
mono
a0381a2 · origin/main · ⇧⌘F
05
Space, shape & depth
A 4 px grid, generous radii and light that comes from the content — glows, not heavy drop shadows.
Spacing
Radius
Depth & glow
shadow-1shadow-2shadow-3glow-accent
06
Motion
Things hazi (grow) into place: quick to start, slow to settle. Motion follows the direction of history, stops for people who ask for reduced motion, and every loop can be paused from the floating button in the corner.
--dur-1 · 120ms
Hover, press, colour changes.
--dur-2 · 240ms
Toggles, menus, small moves.
--dur-3 · 520ms
Panels, cards, notes appearing.
--dur-4 · 1100ms
Reveals and lanes drawing themselves.
07
Icons
A 24 px grid with 1.75 px round strokes, drawn to sit next to the mark. The app itself uses Lucide; these are the website’s. Click an icon to copy its <use> snippet.
08
Graph language
The same vocabulary draws the app’s commit graph, the roadmap and the logo. Lanes take colours in a fixed order, so a branch keeps its colour wherever it appears.
09
Components
The building blocks of the website, each built only from tokens. Flip the preview to see them by day.
Plain words, short sentences, and the real git name for things. Say what will happen before it happens.
Do
Merge feature/login into main
This branch was already pushed. Saving rewrites it on the remote.
Undid “Delete branch experiment”
Don’t
Execute merge operation on selected references
Warning! Are you absolutely sure?
Oops! Something went wrong 😅
11
Story
The story is what makes Adar different. In Basque one word, adar, names a tree’s branch and a deer’s antler, and a git branch grows the same way. The website tells it as one night in the forest, from dark to dawn, and every chapter pairs a Basque word with a part of the product.
#
Euskara
Meaning
In the forest
In Adar
0
Gaua
Night
Antlers grow out of the dark
What Adar is, download
I
Adar
The name
Antler → tree branch → git branch
Why it is called Adar
II
Enborra
The trunk
Every forest starts with a trunk
The app and its commit graph
III
Adarrak
The branches
Branches split and grow back together
Branching, merging, rebasing, staging
IV
Eraztunak
The rings
A tree adds a ring a year and keeps them all
History, blame, undo; Adar’s releases as rings
V
Sustraiak
The roots
Roots drink from what is already in the ground
Your git, your keys, your terminal
VI
Egunsentia
Dawn
Deer shed their antlers and grow a bigger set
Releases and download
VII
Auzolana
Built together
Neighbours working on what belongs to everyone
Open source, roadmap, contributing
The story frames, the product sells. One sentence of forest, then a literal headline about what Adar does.
Only true images. Deer really shed their antlers every year; trees really add a ring a year. If it isn’t true in the forest, it doesn’t go in.
Basque first, then its meaning. Basque words in the serif italic, marked lang="eu", with their meaning in the page’s language beside them.
Never rename git. Branches, commits and rebases keep their names; the metaphor lives in captions and chapter titles.
Imply the deer. Its antlers are enough: no illustrated deer, leaves or wood textures in the interface.
Night to dawn. Light grows as the story moves on, and the download is at dawn.
12
Downloads
Everything is MIT-licensed with the rest of Adar. Use it for articles, talks, forks and integrations — just don’t present a fork as the official Adar.
