Spoonwise

Spoonwise is Holly Gibbs's daily budgeting app for neurodivergent adults. It answers exactly one question — what's safe to spend today? — and refuses to pile on the dashboards, graphs, and guilt that make most budgeting apps unusable for an ADHD or autistic brain.

The name comes from spoon theory (Christine Miserandino): energy is finite, and some days there's less of it. Spoonwise meets you at whatever capacity you have by letting you choose how much detail you can handle today.

Positioning:

• Not a finance dashboard — one number, not forty widgets.
• Not a subscription — $15 once, free tier works forever, offline, in your browser.
• Not surveillance — budget data lives on your device and never leaves it. No account required.

Spoonwise is Holly's personal product. It is not a Howell & Gibbs property and never carries that branding. The only cross-brand reference is the coaching note, which may link to The Grove ("Already working with Holly at The Grove?"), because coaching clients get full access included.

Spoonwise sounds like a steady friend who's good with money and never makes you feel bad about yours. Six words:

In practice:

• One honest number. The flagship phrase and the product promise. Copy leads with the number, never with a feature list.
• Clear, accessible signals. "Signals are clear and accessible, so you don't have to think too hard about what to do next." Green, amber, and orange describe the state of the day; they never scold. "A tight stretch," not "overspent."
• Plain money words. "What's left," "bills," "safe to spend" — never "discretionary income," "cash flow," or "financial wellness."
• Capacity-aware. "Pick the level of detail your brain can handle today." Wanting less detail is never framed as a failure.
• A fresh start, daily. "Each day the number updates and you start fresh."
• No urgency theater. No countdown timers, no "last chance," no streaks to lose. An exclamation point is allowed when it's warmth ("we know those are hard to keep track of!"), never when it's pressure.

The logo is a pink piggy bank being fed a spoonful, tucked into a big blue serif S — hand-drawn line art with black outlines, warm and a little cheeky. She's pink, and she stays pink.

Primary lockup. Light grounds only — white or #F2F9FF.

Favicon. White S in a #255FE4 circle — browser tabs and tiny placements.

Pig icon. Outline-only; also the repeating wallpaper glyph (see Pattern).

Spoon icons. Fill + outline. The fill version is the UI glyph: detail toggle, mode cards, spoon counts.

The wordmark

The horizontal lockup: the pig feeds the leading S, Spoon sets in blue #255FE4 and wise in navy #0D3694. This is what site headers and partner placements use. Where only live text is possible, "Spoonwise" in Mogan (regular, sentence case, navy) stands in. Mogan is the wordmark's own face.

Rules:

• Never recolor the pig. She's pink. The outline pig icon may be recolored as a single-color pattern glyph, but the lockup's pig stays pink.
• The lockup's black line art needs a light ground — never place it on navy or blue bands.
• Spoon counts carry meaning in the product (1 = low, 2 = medium, 3 = high detail) — don't use multiple spoons decoratively where they could read as a mode.
• Never stretch, skew, outline, or add drop shadows.

Holly's palette: a dozen crayon-bright colors on a near-white blue ground. Blue leads (#255FE4 with #0D3694 for depth), everything else pops in support. The status trio (green / amber / orange) belongs to the product's meaning — a signal, not a verdict — and is never used decoratively where it could read as a money state.

Core

The status trio — a signal, not a verdict

Rules: amounts always sit on their own light tint with the darkened "ink" version of the status color for contrast; never use pure red/green stoplight colors; the full rainbow may appear together only as pattern (the capsule band), never near amounts.

Two families, strict roles. Manrope does everything: headlines at 800, working text at 400, buttons and labels at 600. Mogan, the wordmark's face, is reserved for the safe-to-spend number. Where Manrope isn't available, system-ui stands in; where Mogan isn't, Georgia does. Mogan is a licensed font (Heritage Type, via Creative Market): self-host it from the site, and never offer it as a download.

Illustration

Flat, friendly line-art money scenes — black outlines, simple fills, people doing hopeful things with money (watering it, feeding it to pigs). Sourced as Unsplash vectors (Doodis Creative Labs, Tri Wiranto; Unsplash license, no attribution required), with their baked-in background rectangles stripped so they sit directly on the page ground.

One illustration per section, always about the section's idea. Crop each SVG's viewBox to its content so it renders large.

The pig wallpaper

The outline pig icon repeats as a staggered, tone-on-tone pattern: #1D4EBF pigs on #0D3694, small tiles (~220px) so it reads as wallpaper, used on the page's closing band. This is the brand's signature pattern move.

The capsule band

A dense row of tall rounded capsules in the full palette, each cut off above, below, or floating whole — the section divider into dark bands. Capsules are elongated (height ≈ 2× the band) and tightly packed (8px gaps) so little ground shows.

Squiggles

A thin hand-wave line divides sections: hot pink on light grounds, light blue (#5B84E8) between dark bands. Capsule shapes (999px radii) carry everything interactive: buttons, pills, chips, toggles.

• The landing page — getspoonwise.app — is the reference implementation of all of the above.
• The app — getspoonwise.app/app — adopts the same palette, spoon icons, and voice (migration from the old lavender tokens is an open item).
• Favicon vs. touch icon: blue-circle S for browser tabs; full pig lockup on white for home-screen/PWA icons and the og share image (regenerate via scripts/make-og.py).

Pricing language is fixed: the daily safe-to-spend is always free; $15, one payment, access forever. Free tier is "free," never "trial." Coaching clients get full access included — phrased as a gift, never a coupon code.

• Migrate the app's UI from the old lavender tokens to this palette, and swap its spoon glyphs for the drawn icons.
• Social templates built on the pig wallpaper and capsule band.
• Dark-mode token mapping (navy grounds, status pairs re-tuned).