Brand
guidelines

The team, and what to call it

Team Resistance is FIRST Robotics Competition Team 86, a student-led STEM team from Jacksonville, Florida, competing since 1996. It is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. Students design, build and program a competition robot every season and run outreach across Jacksonville. The 2026 robot is OHMER 26, built for the game REBUILT.

The name is an electrical-engineering pun. The brandmark is the Greek letter omega, the symbol for ohms, the unit of electrical resistance, cradling the team number. The tagline runs the same current: Going Against The Current.

Naming rules

• The number leads. Write “Team 86” first and treat “Team Resistance” as the secondary or full name. The robotics community knows the number far better than the name.
• 1996 is a footnote, not a headline. Keep the founding year small and secondary -- a line of body copy or a history note. It never belongs in a hero, a kicker or a lockup.
• The tagline is title case: Going Against The Current. Headlines and labels are UPPERCASE; body copy is sentence case.

Logo suite

Twelve official lockups: horizontal, vertical and brandmark, each in color and one-color mono, each for light and dark grounds, plus a restricted heritage pair. Every file is fully outlined, so there is no live text to break and nothing to open in Illustrator before going to press.

Which file to ask for

• Horizontal is the default. Headers, footers, banners, sponsor walls, email signatures.
• Vertical suits square-ish space: posters, shirt backs, pit banners. It stacks wordmark, tagline and mark, so it needs real height. It is not a footer logo.
• Brandmark is the ohm mark alone, for use only where “Team 86” already appears nearby.
• Mono black or mono white for any one-color job: screen print, embroidery, laser etch, press-brake stencil.
• Heritage (“Since 1996”) is horizontal-only and reserved for anniversary and legacy moments. Ask before using it.

The ring color follows the ground: on dark backgrounds the “86” is white and the ohm ring is trophy gold; on light backgrounds the “86” is black and the ring is volt green. The ring is a single flat fill -- no gradient, no metallic sheen.

Minimum size and clearspace

Below these heights the wordmark counters fill in and the tagline turns to mush. Pick the lockup that fits the space; never shrink one past its floor to make it work.

Clearspace is measured from the ohm mark, not the bounding box. Nothing enters that margin: no type, no rules, no photo edges, no other logos. Under 20px, use nothing at all -- at favicon size the mark loses the “86”, so set the team number as type instead.

What not to do

• Do not re-typeset, condense, re-stack or drop the tagline. Scale proportionally.
• Do not add “1996” to a standard lockup. Only the heritage variant carries it.
• Do not recolor the mark or reintroduce a gradient into the ring.
• Do not substitute a typed omega character for the brandmark. Always place the vector file.
• Do not trap a two-color lockup at small sizes. Use a mono file instead.

Color

Dark-first. An ink-black ground lit by volt green, with trophy gold reserved for honour: awards, sponsor moments, the brandmark. Gold stays special, so do not spend it as a generic secondary.

Core values

Secondary and status builds

Brand color as text

Volt green on white measures about 1.5:1 -- it is not legible as type. On light surfaces, brand-colored text uses Volt 700 (#2A8009) and Gold 600 (#B58200) instead. On ink, the raw brand colors are correct. This applies to print as much as to screen.

Typography

Three families, all open-licensed and cleared for web use, print and embedded PDFs. The brand kit bundles the static font files with their licenses.

How to set it

• Headlines are Open Sans 800 with tight tracking (-0.02em). Open Sans has no 900 cut, so 800 is the heaviest weight in the brand. Note that the 800 file installs as its own family, Open Sans ExtraBold.
• Two casings coexist. Marketing and hero voice sets UPPERCASE, matching the logo wordmark. Documents and dense interfaces use mixed-case bold.
• Eyebrows and micro-labels are uppercase JetBrains Mono, tracked 0.12 to 0.16em.
• Numbers use tabular figures so scores, specs and seasons align in a column.
• Heading color carries rank so hierarchy is legible before a word is read. Display, H1 and H4 are trophy gold; H2 and H5 are volt green; H3 and H6 are white on ink or ink on paper. On light surfaces the gold and green resolve to their print-legible steps. Never stack two gold levels next to each other.
• Inter is not a brand font. The logo wordmark is drawn in Inter Ultra-Bold, but it is the logo's internal type only. Do not set anything else in Inter.

Voice and copy

Earnest, proud and student-first. Never corporate, never jargon-heavy. The team talks like makers who love what they build and want you to join.

• Person: “we” for the team, “you” for the reader. Inclusive and inviting.
• Tone: confident and energetic, grounded in real engineering. Be specific -- name the subsystem, the motor count, the game. Skip hype words.
• Emoji appear sparingly on social media and never in product interfaces, decks or formal copy.
• No em dashes. Use a double dash or a comma.

On-brand lines

• Team 86 -- going against the current.
• A passionate, diverse group of young innovators advancing STEM education through the FIRST Robotics Competition.
• More than a robot -- a launchpad.
• Built by students. Backed by the best.

Avoid: startup-speak (“synergy”, “leverage”, “10x”), exclamation overload, and anything that talks down to students or sponsors.

Photography

Real, action-oriented and unfiltered: robots on the field, students building and presenting, competition energy. Never stock-corporate. Everything below is cleared for public use -- take what you need.

Hero, dark and dramatic

The robot on ink. These sit behind a headline or fill the right half of a title slide, framed with a volt glow.

Community, bright and loud

The crowd, the pit, the team. Keep Ohmer green somewhere in the frame where you can -- it is doing as much brand work as the logo.

Photos in the team's technical binder carry a green rounded border; mirror that with a 2px volt frame when a photo needs framing. Crop to the action rather than shrinking the whole frame.

Credit Team 86 where a caption allows it. If you need a different crop, a higher resolution, or a shot that is not here, ask the team rather than upscaling a web-sized file.

Print and physical media

Rules for vendors

• Ink is the default ground. Print dark-first like the screen system: ink-black field, gold or volt mark. Reverse to paper white only for documents a school office will photocopy.
• Rich black, never flat K100. On coated stock use C60 M40 Y40 K100 for large fields; K100 alone looks washed and shows roller streaks. Small type stays K100 to avoid registration fringing.
• Minimum type on paper: 11pt body, 8pt captions, 7pt legal. Volt green type on ink black must be 12pt or heavier -- below that the fluorescent ink halos.
• Mono logos for one-color jobs. Screen printing, embroidery, laser etch and press-brake stencils all use the mono white or mono black horizontal file.
• Fabric shifts warm. On polyester jerseys volt green prints roughly one step duller. Ask for a fluorescent plastisol or a sublimation proof before approving a run.
• Bleed and safety: 0.125in bleed and 0.25in safety on sheet work; 2in pole-pocket allowance and 1in safety on banners.

Digital and web

This document covers the brand. If you are building something -- a web page, a dashboard, an internal tool -- there is a full component library behind it: buttons, badges, cards, form fields, tables, alerts, navigation and the token set that drives them, all working on both the ink and paper surfaces without local overrides.

These two pages are themselves built from that library, which is the shortest demonstration of what it does. Ask the team for access to the design system repository rather than rebuilding these pieces by hand. Consistency across the team's digital surfaces is the reason it exists.

A few rules that reach beyond the code:

• Backgrounds are flat ink or flat paper. The one permitted gradient is a faint radial volt wash behind hero content. No purple or blue gradients.
• The volt and gold glows are the signature energized elevation. Use them on a primary action or a single featured element, never everywhere.
• Motion is quick: roughly 120ms for hovers and presses, 200ms for elevation changes. Respect prefers-reduced-motion and never loop decorative animation behind text.
• Icons are Lucide, 2px stroke, tinted with the current text color.

Assets and contact

The brand kit contains every logo lockup, the three font families with their licenses, the color values as plain text, and the PowerPoint and Word templates.

Need something that is not here -- a vector in a different format, a photograph, a one-color variant, sponsor placement guidance? Ask the team through teamresistance.org rather than recreating it. Recreated marks are the single most common way a brand drifts.