Brand guidelines
How Selah looks, sounds and feels.
Description
Selah helps you stick with the Bible, entirely over email. One chapter lands in your inbox each day and replies do everything: advance readings, save notes, pause delivery and change settings.
The pillars
- No app, just email. Progress, notes and settings, all from your inbox.
- Arrives like a letter. One chapter a day, within a window you choose.
- One chapter, one day. A pace you’ll actually keep, no plans to fall behind.
- No streaks, no guilt. Miss a day and the same chapter simply returns.
- Your pace, your rules. Split chapters, pause weekends, start mid-book.
- Just you and the word. No feeds, no nudges, no clutter.
Positioning
People who have started the Bible more times than they can count and never finished. People who are tired of every habit living in another app.
- Serial non-finishers. Started the Bible several times, always stalled somewhere around Leviticus. They don’t need another plan, they need one that survives missed days.
- The app-fatigued. Live in email and wary of another app, another feed, another streak. They want nothing new to install and nothing between them and the text.
The enemy: the abandoned reading plan, with the feed as supporting cast. Selah content is never against other apps by name. It is against the plan that died in February.
The one claim: the reasons you quit before don’t work on Selah. Chapter splitting, weekend pause, the chapter that returns until you’ve read it: every feature is proof of that claim, never the pitch.
A finish line with no clock. Finishing matters, the date does not. Selah sells finishing, never speed. Nothing we write may imply a reader is behind.
Assets
Selah in Hebrew is סֶלָה, read right to left. It appears throughout the Psalms and is traditionally read as a pause. The first letter is called Samekh (ס), which we’ve used for our logo. It’s also associated with support and continuity.
- Light version on brand colour, dark version on white background
- Keep at least half the mark’s width clear on every side
- Don’t stretch, rotate or add effects
Colours
The palette for posts, images and anything outward-facing. Tap a colour to copy its hex.
Typography
Tap a font to copy its name.
Line height is always font size plus 8px.
Voice
Quiet, contemplative, practical. Respectful of the reader’s time and faith. Never preachy, never salesy, never performative. Scripture is treated as self-evidently worth reading. Selah delivers the chapter and gets out of the way.
What it is not: excitable, performative, hustle-coded, app-marketing-coded.
Agnostic by design: deliberately neutral on denomination and teacher. Catholic, Protestant, Anglican and Orthodox readers should all be able to use Selah without friction. No shibboleths in either direction. The text is the text; the reader brings their tradition to it.
Words
Lean into
Try avoid
Spiritual self-help: journey, walk with God, grow in your faith, deepen, transform, relationship with God, spiritual discipline, level up
Devotional industry: devotional (as what Selah is), quiet time, the Lord spoke, abide, dwell, soak
Evangelical rhetoric: share the Gospel, spread the Word, transformational, life-changing, encounter
App marketing: streak, reading plan (as what Selah is), gamified, unlock, discover, join thousands, less screen time (email is still a screen)
Topics we stay out of
Not wording, but subjects. Selah stays out of these whatever words you use. They’re what keeps it open to every reader.
- No evangelism copy. Selah is for the reader’s own reading, not a tool to witness with.
- No prayer framing. Selah is reading, not prayer.
- No moral formation promises. Selah offers reading, not self-improvement.
- No doctrinal specifics. The text is the text.
- No prophecy or “a word for you today” framing.
- No politics.
Writing rules
- British English. Colour, personalised, honour.
- No em dashes. Use commas or restructure the sentence.
- No Oxford commas. Red, blue and green.
- Selah, never SELAH, in prose. Uppercase belongs to the wordmark.
- Curly apostrophes. It’s, don’t, you’ll.. never straight quotes.
- Commands are lowercase with the @. @read, @pause, @settings.
- Short sentences. Direct over clever. Calm authority, not hype. No exclamation marks.