Basics
Principles
Tomatico's five brand values, restated as things you can actually decide with. When two designs both look fine, these break the tie.
The five values
The brand book names five values: smart, secure, efficient, sustainable and human centered. On their own they are adjectives. Below, each one is turned into a rule you can apply to a screen — and a way to tell when you have broken it.
Smart — the product does the thinking
Intelligence should show up as work the person does not have to do. Pre-fill what you already know. Default to the answer that is right most of the time. Compute the total rather than asking someone to add it up.
Smart does not mean clever or surprising. A screen that hides a control until you hover, or invents a gesture nobody has seen before, is making the person do the thinking. That is the opposite.
Secure — never surprising, never irreversible
Tomatico products control doors, cameras and power in people's homes. Security is not just a padlock icon; it is the confidence that nothing happens by accident.
- Destructive and physical actions confirm first, and the confirmation says exactly what will happen — "Unlock the front door", not "Are you sure?".
- State is always visible. If a device is offline, the screen says so rather than showing a stale reading.
- Anything that cannot be undone is styled as such. See destructive buttons.
Efficient — the shortest honest path
Remove steps, not information. Efficiency comes from cutting the number of screens, fields and confirmations between intent and result — not from cramming more onto one page or dropping labels to save space.
In practice: one primary action per screen, sensible defaults on every field, no optional field that could be inferred, and no confirmation step that exists only out of habit.
Sustainable — build it to last
The brand value is about caring for the future, and in an interface that reads two ways.
For the product: surface consumption honestly — energy used, savings made — because a person cannot reduce what they cannot see.
For the code: a design that only one person can maintain is not sustainable. Prefer the documented component over a bespoke one. Prefer a token over a literal. Ship less CSS. Send fewer bytes, especially over the mobile networks many of our customers use.
Human centered — designed for people, made for life
This is the value with the sharpest consequences, because it is the one that decides who gets left out.
- Both languages are first class. Arabic is not a translation layer bolted on at the end. If a screen was only ever checked in English, it is not finished. See Bilingual and RTL.
- Accessibility is the floor, not a feature. WCAG 2.1 AA is the minimum every Tomatico interface clears. See Accessibility.
- Design for the bad day. The person using a smart-home app at 2am because an alarm went off is not reading carefully. Make the important thing obvious and the dangerous thing hard to hit by mistake.
- Plain words. No jargon, no internal system names, no error codes without an explanation. See Content.
A sixth, unwritten one: restraint
Tomatico's identity is monochrome, geometric and quiet. That is a deliberate constraint, and it is what makes the brand recognisable. The temptation in interface work is to reach for a colour, a gradient or an animation to solve a hierarchy problem.
Solve it with space, weight and contrast instead. If a screen genuinely cannot be made legible without introducing a new colour, the problem is the amount of content on it — not the palette.