DivvyLaw · November 2026

Five ways to rebuild the Divvy brand

The February 2026 guidelines were written for one reader and lit for dusk. These five directions each answer the same brief: speak to men and women equally, use fonts anyone can install, make the imagery bright and real, choose colors for what they do to a reader, and offer hope without pretending divorce is easy. Each is a complete guideline document. This page is the audit, the comparison, and a recommendation.

The audit

What the current brand does, measured

74–110
Mean luminance (0–255) of the twelve blog cards on divvylaw.com/blog. Editorial photography that reads as hopeful sits at 140 and above. Half of each card is a navy panel, which pulls the whole feed toward night.
5 of 12
Blog images with recognizable AI tells: a glowing network overlay, waxy skin, merged fingers, furniture that disagrees with its shadows. About 40% of consumers say they trust a brand less for undisclosed AI imagery.
4 → 2
Type families. Season Serif and Haas Grotesk Display Black are paid or trial faces (the PDF embeds a "TRIAL" cut of Season). Every direction replaces the four with two free Google Fonts families.

How the 2026 guide speaks to women only

  • Palette: butter yellow #FBE99F, powder blue #A4D3E7 and blush beige #E6DED4 together. Women's color preferences lean toward the red end of the spectrum and toward lighter, pinker tints; this palette sits exactly there.
  • Styling: a throw blanket over a sofa, a mug of tea, a woman curled up with a laptop, a hand trailing in still water, a kayak at dusk. Every customer photographed is a woman.
  • Type: a soft, high-contrast serif (Season) used for every emotional line. The one hard voice (Haas Grotesk Black) is reserved for "WHY TRUST US?"
  • Mood: reflection and solitude. Nothing in the imagery shows anyone doing anything.

Current palette, left to right: Blue, Light Blue, Yellow, Beige, Light Beige, Black.

What has to change in every direction

  • Casting counted at 50/50, solo subjects over couples, fathers as caregivers, no domestic-feminine props.
  • Exposure target on every image: mean luminance at or above 140, no more than 15% of pixels in deep shadow.
  • No generative AI for people, hands, rooms or documents. A review checklist and a disclosure rule for the rest.
  • The blog card gets a light panel; the navy panel is retired.
  • Hope is defined as agency plus a visible path, and every photograph has to show one or both. That is the product's own mechanism turned into an image rule.
  • Every color lists its role, its intended effect, and the study behind it.

Sources: Hurlbert & Ling 2007; Clutch 2025; Snyder 1994.

The five directions

Each one is a different answer to "why should I trust you with this?"

Open any card for the complete guidelines: foundations, audience, logo, color with psychology and measured contrast, typography, imagery rules and shot list, graphic device, voice, applications, implementation tokens and sources.

divvy

Direction 1

Clear Sky

Keep what people already recognize. Fix what holds it back.

Strategy: Evolution · Register: Calm

Type: Fraunces + Instrument Sans

Imagery: Cool, even daylight.

Choose if: You want continuity with the beta, the HubSpot theme, and twelve months of blog assets, and you want the fix shipped before the December launch.

Risk: Looks like a refresh, not a repositioning. Hello Divorce and most law firms also own blue.

Rubric total 22/30

Open the full guidelines →
divvy

Direction 2

Daybreak

The category is cold. Be the warm one.

Strategy: Warmth · Register: Warmth

Type: Newsreader + Figtree

Imagery: Golden hour and morning window light.

Choose if: You want the brand to lead on feeling, the podcast and social program are central, and you are willing to re-shoot imagery before launch.

Risk: Orange needs discipline; one loud page and the brand reads as a consumer app. Requires a re-shoot before launch.

Rubric total 23/30

Open the full guidelines →
divvy

Direction 3

Steady

Hope is a plan you can see.

Strategy: Competence · Register: Control

Type: Manrope + Source Sans 3

Imagery: Neutral daylight, clean and crisp.

Choose if: The platform is the product, the beta UX test matters more than the blog, and you want the brand to look like it belongs beside TurboTax and Upsolve.

Risk: Can run cold if the photography rules slip. The all-sans system gives the blog less editorial texture.

Rubric total 26/30

Open the full guidelines →
divvy

Direction 4

New Ground

Divorce is an ending. Show the beginning.

Strategy: Renewal · Register: Renewal

Type: Lora + Public Sans

Imagery: Outdoors, Southern California, open sky.

Choose if: The community and podcast strategy leads, you want a brand that can stretch to custody, prenups and post-divorce life, and local identity (LA and OC) is part of the pitch.

Risk: Green is the least-studied hue; sage can drift toward wellness and spa if the type gets soft. Outdoor shoots cost more.

Rubric total 23/30

Open the full guidelines →
divvy

Direction 5

Plain Truth

Tell people the truth about divorce. Then help them handle it.

Strategy: Candor · Register: Respect

Type: Source Serif 4 + Libre Franklin

Imagery: Documentary and available-light.

Choose if: Content and SEO are the growth engine, the founder's credibility is the brand, and you want to look nothing like a consumer app or a law firm.

Risk: The most serious of the five, so the hope has to come entirely from the words and the photographs. Less room for the podcast's informality.

Rubric total 22/30

Open the full guidelines →

Scoring

Rubric

Scored 1 to 5 against the six things the brief asked for, plus implementation cost against the December 22 launch. These are my scores; the point of the table is to argue about it with the co-founders.

CriterionClear SkyDaybreakSteadyNew GroundPlain Truth
Reads equally for men and women44544
Offers hope on a hard subject45453
Legal credibility with investors and users43535
Distinct from Hello Divorce and law-firm blue25444
Cheap and fast to implement before December 2252423
Stretches to custody, prenups, domestic violence34453
Total2223262322

Recommendation

Steady, with Clear Sky as the fallback

Pick Direction 3, Steady. It is the only one of the five that turns the product's actual mechanism, named steps with done states, into the brand idea, which is also the one psychological definition of hope that holds up: agency plus a visible pathway. Cobalt is the single hue both men and women rank first, green is reserved for progress so it never dilutes, and the page is mostly white, the color most tied to relief. It is the most gender-neutral of the five by construction, it is the most legible to investors because it looks like the category leaders in adjacent hard-paperwork products (Upsolve, TurboTax), and an all-sans system is the fastest to implement in HubSpot and in the beta before the UX study.

Its weakness is real: it can run cold. The imagery rules are what keep it warm, so the photo session is not optional. If the budget or the calendar cannot carry a shoot before launch, ship Direction 1, Clear Sky, instead: it keeps everything the site already loads, fixes the three failures (dark cards, AI imagery, paid fonts) and can be live in a week. Move to Steady after launch.

Borrow one thing from Direction 5. Plain Truth's candor rule for headlines (say the hard thing first, then the way through) should apply to the blog under any direction. The content engine is the growth engine, and its credibility comes from not flinching.

Do not pick Daybreak or New Ground for launch unless you are prepared to re-shoot everything first. Both depend on a specific quality of light that cannot be faked with the current library.

Research basis

What the color claims rest on, and where they are thin

Holds up across studies

  • Lighter colors are rated more pleasant than darker ones; gray is rated less pleasant than any hue. (Wilms & Oberfeld 2018)
  • Yellow and orange are tied to joy, white to relief, black and gray to sadness, across 30 nations and 22 languages. (Jonauskaite et al. 2020)
  • Blue is the most preferred hue for both sexes; women's preferences shift toward the red end, men's do not. (Hurlbert & Ling 2007)
  • People prefer colors of things they like: clear sky, clean water, foliage; they dislike the colors of spoilage. (Palmer & Schloss 2010)
  • Blue signals competence in brand contexts; blue websites test as more trustworthy. (Labrecque & Milne 2012; Elliot 2015)

Treat with caution

  • Most color research tests red. Blue and green are under-studied, lightness and saturation more so.
  • Many older studies were small, unblinded and could not control the color on screen. Effect sizes are likely inflated.
  • Color meaning is contextual: the same blue reads differently on a ribbon and on meat. Brand context has to be tested, not assumed.
  • None of this measures "hope" directly. The hope framework used here (Snyder) is about motivation, not color; the imagery rules apply it.

Elliot 2015: "the field is at an early stage." Test the chosen palette inside the beta UX study already planned.

Sources

References

  1. Elliot, A. J. (2015). Color and psychological functioning: a review of theoretical and empirical work. Frontiers in Psychology, 6, 368. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00368/full
  2. Labrecque, L. I., & Milne, G. R. (2012). Exciting red and competent blue: the importance of color in marketing. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 40, 711–727. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11747-010-0245-y
  3. Jonauskaite, D., et al. (2020). Universal patterns in color-emotion associations are further shaped by linguistic and geographic proximity. Psychological Science, 31(10). https://biopen.bi.no/bi-xmlui/bitstream/11250/2761614/1/Jonauskaite_etal_2020_PsychScience.pdf
  4. Hurlbert, A. C., & Ling, Y. (2007). Biological components of sex differences in color preference. Current Biology, 17(16). https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/08/070820120720.htm
  5. Palmer, S. E., & Schloss, K. B. (2010). An ecological valence theory of human color preference. PNAS, 107(19), 8877–8882. https://palmerlab.berkeley.edu/pdf/Palmer%26Schloss%282010%29.pdf
  6. Wilms, L., & Oberfeld, D. (2018). Color and emotion: effects of hue, saturation, and brightness. Psychological Research, 82, 896–914. https://www.staff.uni-mainz.de/oberfeld/downloads/Wilms-Oberfeld2018_Article_ColorAndEmotionEffectsOfHueSat.pdf
  7. Snyder, C. R. (1994). The Psychology of Hope: You Can Get There From Here. Free Press. Summary at PositivePsychology.com. https://positivepsychology.com/hope-theory/
  8. Rosenfeld, M. (2015). Who wants the breakup? Gender and breakup in heterosexual couples. American Sociological Association press release. https://www.asanet.org/women-more-likely-men-initiate-divorces-not-non-marital-breakups/
  9. Clutch (2025). 57% of consumers can't spot AI photos; 40% trust a brand less when AI imagery is undisclosed. Business Wire, Sept. 18, 2025. https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20250918110362/en/Clutch-Report-57-of-Consumers-Cant-Spot-AI-Photos-What-That-Means-for-Brands
  10. Design Week (2020). Farewill adopts a light-hearted identity for will writing and probate. https://www.designweek.co.uk/issues/27-january-2-february-2020/rebranding-death-farewill-identity/
  11. W3C. Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.2, Success Criterion 1.4.3 Contrast (Minimum). https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG22/#contrast-minimum
  12. Google Fonts. All typefaces specified in these guidelines are served under the SIL Open Font License at no cost. https://fonts.google.com

Site audit: divvylaw.com and divvylaw.com/blog, read November 3, 2026. Comparables viewed the same day: upsolve.org and atticus.com. Current guidelines: Divvy Brand Guidelines, InDesign export dated February 17, 2026.