Brand and usage

Uptick Board is the AI category exchange: a public board of AI categories, each with a ticker and a price, where companies pay to hold the top spot. This page holds the marks, the colours and the language. It exists mainly for the language.

LAST UPDATED 28 SEPTEMBER 2026 · v1.2 · REVISION HISTORY AT THE FOOT OF THE PAGE

The line that governs everything else

Placements on Uptick Board are advertising, not investments. Stakes are non-refundable, non-transferable, and confer no ownership of anything. Prices reflect what advertisers have paid for placement.

Reproduce it verbatim wherever the mechanism is described. It appears here, in the footer of every page, and on every category page. One short form is approved for social cards only, where the full line will not set: Placements are advertising, not investments. Use it nowhere else.

Boilerplate

For press, use it whole. Uptick Board is a public board of AI categories. Each category carries a three- or four-letter ticker and a price. Companies pay to hold the top spot in a category, and the holder's mark appears on the board until someone pays more. Placements are advertising: a stake buys visibility and nothing else, with no shares, no ownership, no claim on a category, a company or Uptick Board itself, and no return beyond the placement purchased. The published price is a record of what advertisers have paid, not a valuation of anything. Uptick Board also publishes The Uptick Report, a Monday newsletter on movement across the board. Uptick Board is operated by Gusto Solutions, LLC of Redding, California. More at uptickboard.com.

Short. Uptick Board is a public board of AI categories where companies pay to hold the top spot. Placements are advertising.

Vocabulary

The board borrows the furniture of an exchange. It is not one. The words below carry legal weight, and the wrong one turns an advertising product into a description of a security.

Approved throughout: listing, placement, stake, sealed stake, Stake Payment, Total Stake, Claim Price, standing stake, Cap, sponsorship, hold, holder, take the top spot, passed, price, tick, uptick, ticker, category, layer, board, the Opening Bell, the Lock, the Open, founding holder.

On the word "exchange". Our descriptor is The AI category exchange. It describes the form of the product, a public board of priced categories, and is not a claim that trading occurs or that a market exists. If a single word is needed, "board" is always correct.

Register. Plain, declarative, unhurried. No emoji, no exclamation marks, no countdowns, no urgency. Dates are written Sat 10 Oct · 12:00 AM PT. The house lines, if you need the pitch of it: Every AI category has a price. · Prices move only when money does. · There is no algorithm. The board is a ledger. · There are no downticks on this board.

The name

• Uptick Board, two words, both capitalised, always. Not Uptickboard, not UpTick, not "the Uptick Board", not "Uptick" alone on first mention. After first mention, "the board".
• The Uptick Report: the newsletter, definite article capitalised, Mondays.
• The Opening Bell is the launch round of sealed stakes; the Open is the moment on Sat 10 Oct; the Lock is 24 hours before it.
• Tickers are three or four letters, uppercase, unpunctuated: GRAG, never G.R.A.G. and never $GRAG. The cashtag reads as a tradable instrument and is the fastest way to misrepresent the product.
• The company is Gusto Solutions, LLC d/b/a Uptick Board, Redding, California. Founder: Richie Booth.

The marks

There are two. They are not interchangeable.

Lockups

• Wordmark lockup: tape plus UPTICK BOARD. The default. Minimum 130 px wide.
• Wordmark with descriptor: adds THE AI CATEGORY EXCHANGE. First contact: covers, headers, press kits. Minimum 290 px wide; below that, drop the descriptor rather than shrink it.
• Stacked: the cell above the wordmark, for square placements. Minimum 48 px.
• Clear space: one eighth of the mark's height on all sides. Nothing sits inside it.
• Backgrounds: amber on #0B0E13 is the default. The one-colour mark is approved black on white and black on amber. On any other ground, one colour at full contrast. Never on photography, gradients or patterns.
• Do not recolour outside the palette; rotate, skew, outline, or add shadow, glow or gradient; reset the wordmark in another typeface; alter the spacing inside a lockup; use the mark as a character in a sentence; combine it with another mark to imply a partnership.

Marks and lockups as outlined SVG and PNG, dark and light; favicons; social cards; board and category-page screenshots at 2x; the palette as tokens; this page as a PDF.

Colour

Terminal palette; amber is the brand. The product is dark only. Three exceptions: the light holder badge, the one-colour mark, and print. Red is reserved. It marks a delisted category and appears nowhere else. Prices on this board hold or rise, so there is no red for "down". Using it for anything else, errors, alerts, emphasis, breaks the one signal the board makes.

Type

IBM Plex Mono: the wordmark, all tickers, all prices, all data. IBM Plex Sans: prose. Both are open source under the SIL Open Font License and free for you to use in coverage or co-marketing. Set the wordmark in Plex Mono Medium, uppercase, tracked 0.20em, amber, or use the supplied artwork, which is the safer route.

The holder badge

Current holders may display a badge on their own site. It reads, exactly: Holder of GRAG on Uptick Board, with their ticker. The badge is an SVG served live from uptickboard.com at /badge/TICKER/dark.svg or /badge/TICKER/light.svg. There are no badge files to download. When a placement lapses, the same URL returns the plain Uptick Board mark with no ticker, so the embed stays where it is and stops making a claim.

Examples, shown at 40 px. On your site the embed sets 28 px.

<a href="https://uptickboard.com/c/GRAG">
  <img src="https://uptickboard.com/badge/GRAG/light.svg"
       alt="Holder of GRAG on Uptick Board" height="28">
</a>

• Hotlink it. Do not copy, cache or self-host; a saved copy becomes a false claim the day the placement ends.
• Keep the alt text verbatim, keep the link to the category page, keep the 28 px height. Scale proportionally if you must; never crop, recolour or reset the wording.
• Display it only while you hold the placement, and do not extend the claim. "Holder of GRAG on Uptick Board" is the claim. "#1 in AI", "top-ranked", "leading" and "certified" are not, and are not supported by a placement.

Press

Quotes, screenshots, interviews, or a check on phrasing before publication: desk@uptickboard.com. If you are unsure whether a sentence describes the product accurately, send it; we answer with a correction or a confirmation, in writing, the same day on weekdays, Pacific time.

Revisions