Brand book · September 2026 · edition one
Founded and run by a firefighter, a police officer and their brother. Roasted in the USA. 10% goes to first responder foundations that support families affected by line of duty deaths, tragedies, and individuals in need. This book is how the brand looks, sounds and behaves, on a bag, in a feed, in an email and on a firehouse wall.
Contents
01 · Who we are
Duty To Act Coffee was founded in 2020 by three brothers: firefighter Eli Held, police officer Max Held, and entrepreneur Josh Held. Between them, they knew two things from the job. Coffee gets first responders through every shift, and when one of them dies in the line of duty, their family is too often left without support. So they started a coffee company that does both, fueling the people who serve and giving back to the families of those who never came home.
Sold direct at dutytoact.shop, by subscription at home, and by the pound to the firehouse and the precinct. Enjoyed in hundreds of firehouses and police departments. Every cup gives back.
02 · Audience
Everyone this brand speaks to is inside the same world: people who run toward the call, and the people who stand behind them. The core is 20 to 50, working age, on shift or married to it. Write to the identity, not the demographic.
Firefighters, police, sheriff, EMS and paramedics, dispatchers, nurses, corrections. Serving, retired, and the academy class that has not started yet. They buy because the brand is theirs, not because it is marketed at them.
Reads as: in-group, earned, never performed.
Partners, parents, siblings and friends of someone serving, and people with no badge in the house who back the job anyway. This is most of the gift buying and a large share of the at-home subscriptions.
Reads as: warm, domestic, mission forward.
Veterans, and the large crossover of veterans now serving as first responders. Adjacent, not the target: this brand is first responder founded and does not compete for the veteran coffee buyer on their own ground.
Reads as: service continued, not service past.
Old enough to be on shift or running a house, young enough to be on the platforms where this brand lives. Casting, language and price all sit here. The retired responder is a real buyer above it and worth serving, but they are not who the creative is aimed at.
Four people who buy, four registers. Never blend them.
The captain or engineer who orders for the station. Operational: price per pound, grind, delivery cadence, the donation in the agency's name. Not emotional.
Partner of someone serving. Buys the family coffee and most of the Christmas order. The kitchen at 5am, the ritual. Warm and domestic, never tactical.
On shift, buys for himself, wears the brand. Hard, dry, in-group. Merch first, coffee second, subscription once it is identity. Nothing that reads as marketing.
No badge in the house. Buys the cause. Mission forward and specific: named funds, real numbers, where the money went. The sensitivity rule bites hardest here.
04 · Marks
The shield is the badge: a star on a chevron, gold on dark. The wordmark sets Duty To Act above Coffee in Mausoleum. The stacked lockup puts the shield between them and belongs on the deep green poster and anything tall. Use the file, never redraw.
Icon · the shield alone. Profile pictures, favicons, the crest on photo layouts.
Wordmark, cream · on charcoal, ink, field green and photographs.
Wordmark, ink · on bone, gold and white.
Stacked · the product poster and tall frames. The hero lockup.
Keep the height of the C in COFFEE clear on every side. Nothing enters it: not type, not a pack shot, not a foundation badge.
Wordmark no narrower than 120 px on screen or 25 mm in print. Below that, use the icon.
Recolor outside cream, ink and gold. Stretch. Outline. Add a drop shadow. Set it over a busy photograph without a scrim. Put a foundation logo inside the lockup.
05 · Color
These are the advertising colors, taken pixel by pixel from the approved posters. Charcoal frames everything. Bone and gold are the two panels. Red shouts. Field green is the product poster's ground. Flash yellow is the price sticker and the hazard bar, and nothing else.
| Type | Ground | Use |
|---|---|---|
| Ink | Bone, gold, flash | Panels, stickers |
| Cream | Charcoal, field, ink | Bars, posters, photo frames |
| White | Red | The shout band, the red pill half |
| Gold | Ink, charcoal | Eyebrows, rules, the stat figure |
dutytoact.shop and the partner pages run on their own tokens: paper #F6F4EF, ink #141210, duty red #B22234, service navy #1B2A41, honor gold #B98A1E. They are tuned for reading and accessibility on screens. Do not use them on advertising, and do not use the advertising colors on the site.
06 · Type
Mausoleum is the voice of the mark and the poster headline. United Sans Condensed Heavy is the wall of type on photo frames, sized line by line to fill its column. OCHighway carries every paragraph, label, marquee and button.
Display and poster headlines. Always uppercase. Seven words or fewer. Line height 0.95.
The type wall on photo-led frames and the shout band. Each line fills the column; the last line may take the red.
Retail is $16.99 a pound. Your station pays $11.55, delivered to the house. That is 32% off every order, and 10% goes to first responder foundations, raised in your department's name.
Station subscription · Kicker and label style
Headline fills the column, never a fixed size. Body 26 to 32 px on a 1080 frame. Kicker 26 px tracked 6 px. Marquee 74% of its strip height. Button 27 px.
Where the brand faces cannot load: Georgia for Mausoleum, Arial Narrow or Impact for United, Helvetica for OCHighway. Never Inter, never a rounded geometric.
Mixed case in a display headline. Letter-spaced Mausoleum. A body paragraph in United. Two headline faces on one frame.
07 · Photography
Warm dark tones, sunrise and night-shift light, equipment texture, close coffee moments. Six libraries: the brand (the founders, the crew, the check), responders (the bay, the gear, the lights), product (bags, beans, grounds), product in the world (the bag on the apparatus, in an officer's hand), lifestyle (the mug, off shift) and apparel. Real people only. Nothing gratuitous. A fire is effort and scale, never spectacle.
Casting. Real responders and real owners only. Never a model in a costume, never an AI-generated person. If the frame shows a name tape, a unit or a vehicle number, a founder clears it before it is published.
Three baked duotones so a photograph sits under type without fighting it. Ink is the house default. Red is urgency, used rarely. Gold is warmth for coffee and material. Natural for the founders when they are the subject.
With the founders, the crew or any person in frame, no frame edge, panel or type cuts a face. People photographs are anchored to the head so a crop takes from the feet. On a wide frame a people photograph takes its own column at its own proportion; it is never stretched full-bleed across 16:9. On a 3:1 banner it is never full-bleed at all.
License. Several responder photographs came from the shared folder with no source on record. They are fine for comps and organic. Clear them before paid media or print. The register is public/brand/asset-licenses.json.
08 · Product
Medium Roast, Dark Roast and French Vanilla in 12 oz, 2 lb and K-Cup, whole bean or ground, plus an Espresso Blend. The cream bag with the dark arch is the pack; the roast is named in color under the shield.
| Offer | Price | Who |
|---|---|---|
| 12 oz bag, retail | $16.99 per lb equivalent | At home |
| Subscribe and Save | Skip or cancel anytime | At home, the repeatable unit |
| First Responder Station Subscription | $11.55 per lb · 32% off · 10 to 160 lb · every 15 to 75 days | The firehouse or precinct. No competitor sells this. |
Shipping is always charged. Never imply an all-in price the artwork cannot support. Pack shots are transparent cut-outs and bleed off the frame edge; a bag is never cropped so hard it stops reading as a bag.
The product where it is actually used
09 · Layout system
Read off the approved Buy 1 Get 1 and K-Cup posters and rebuilt as a system. Every offer-led frame is these six parts in this order. Panels paint edge to edge; nothing floats in empty color.
Station subscription
For a limited time, buy any 12 oz bag and get a second bag free.
12 oz bagsOrder nowMedium, Dark or French Vanilla
Edge to edge, the cream wordmark centered. First thing on every offer frame.
Kicker, a heavy uppercase headline, one short paragraph, the two-tone button. Copy takes half the width; two whole bags take the rest.
Red says what is on offer, gold says the action. Drink coffeeSupport heroes
Red, rotated 4 degrees, between two charcoal marquee strips. The whole offer in words that fill the band: "Buy 1 get 1 free", never "BOGO".
Flash yellow, rotated 12 degrees, sitting on the bag. Only when there is a price to shout.
The range, whole, filling its panel. A named choice, never "take your pick" alone. The foundation badge here if the frame is a partnership.
Statement, split, stat and badge set a type wall over a treated photograph. Their devices are hard-edged: the crest in the corner, a stencil eyebrow with a short bar, a slab call to action with a flash chevron tail, and the hazard bar carrying the giveback line along the foot. No rounded web pills on a photo frame.
"10% donated to [foundation] · raised in your name" runs on the footer of the offer poster and inside the ribbon under the hazard bar on photo frames. It is small, tracked and always present. It is never the headline on a general offer; it is the proof.
10% donated to first responders · raised in your name
11 · In use
Every frame below was rendered by the Creative Studio from the same station-subscription spec, at the frame named. This is the standard: a frame that fills, a number on it, the giveback on it, and a person where the layout wants one.
12 · Giveback
10% goes to first responder foundations that support families affected by line of duty deaths, tragedies, and individuals in need. When a station, a union local or an agency buys, that money is raised in the organization's name and donated to a partner foundation. The department is the fundraiser. The money is never paid to a government agency, and the wording is exact.
| Say | Never |
|---|---|
| On any frame: 10% goes to first responder foundations that support families affected by line of duty deaths, tragedies, and individuals in need | 10% of revenue · every purchase donates · a per-bag dollar figure until one is set and provable |
| Only when an organization is buying: raised in your department's name | Raised in your name, on a frame aimed at a shopper at home. The clause belongs to the agency sale. |
| Donated to the partner foundation | Paid to your department · goes to your station |
| The [name] mission · raised for [name] | Any possessive on an abbreviated foundation name |
Report a figure only when it has been paid, with the photograph. A name at the start of the month, the exact dollars mid-month, then the next agency.
A foundation's mark goes on a frame only when the frame is about that partnership. On a general offer it is logo spam. Duty To Act Coffee is the hero brand on every frame.
14 · The library
Everything the brand owns, organized and deduplicated. The kit is the system, the pack shots are the product, the photography is the world it lives in. Full resolution masters stay in Dropbox; these are the working files.
8.6 MB · 6 folders
Marks, the three fonts, the eight Studio cut-outs, every layout device as an editable SVG, the approved creative, the strategy document and the image license register.
Download↓16.6 MB · 38 renders
The official product renders on transparent grounds, trimmed to the artwork. Every roast in 12 oz, 2 pound and K-Cup, front, back, sides and top.
Download↓15.8 MB · 149 images
Brand, responders, product, apparel and lifestyle. The September 2026 shoot included, four near-duplicate frames removed, every file at working size.
Download↓| Folder | What is in it |
|---|---|
| Brand | The founders, fire and police together, the crew, the check handover, a firefighter with the mug |
| Responders | The engine bay, turnout gear, the ladder, smoke, light bars, the cruiser |
| Product | Bags, the range, beans, grounds, burlap, and the 2026 shoot in the world |
| Apparel | Tees, hoodies and hats on real people, front and back prints |
| Lifestyle | Off shift. The mug, the truck, golden hour |
13 · Rules
Every rule in this book is enforced in the Creative Studio at /command/creative: the generator is told them, the validator blocks the ones it can detect, and every prompt-edit teaches the next run. Work made outside the Studio is checked against this page by a founder before it goes out.