What Vigil is, and what it refuses to be.
Vigil is a companion for the long, ordinary middle of grief, the months and years after a death, an estrangement, or a disappearance, when the world has politely moved on and you have not. It is the second product from Martori, a studio for the losses that remake us.
The positioning, in one line
For the ones who are still here, a place to keep watch beside a loss, when there is nothing left to do but stay.
The thesis
Heartbreak has energy: anger, longing, hope, a person you can still reach. Grief has none of that. There is only the fact of the absence and the person you have to become inside it. Sanctuary was built for the first. Vigil is built for the second. It does not move people through grief; it moves alongside them.
Who Vigil is for
Not the person in acute crisis. That belongs to clinical care and 988. Vigil is for the functioning griever: going to work, feeding themselves, having conversations, while carrying something heavy that everyone around them has stopped asking about. The adult child still reaching for the phone. The parent with nowhere to put a loss that size. The person whose best friend died and is told they should be over it. The sibling who vanished. The mother who chose not to know them anymore.
The five brand pillars
- Presence over progress. Vigil never measures how far through grief someone is. It keeps watch; it does not push.
- Sovereignty. The Keeper owns their Archive, their data, their pace. Healing is never gated or monetized.
- Slow-tech, anti-engagement. No streaks, no red dots, no dark patterns. Success is the practice, not the minutes.
- Honesty about uncertainty. Vigil does not know how long grief takes, and never pretends to.
- Witness, not fix. The product, and Wren, hold the conversation open rather than closing it with answers.
Vigil does not promise healing. It promises presence. Every decision (visual, verbal, commercial) is measured against that sentence.
A house, lit from within.
Vigil shares Martori's design DNA (restraint, slow-tech, no dark patterns) but carries its own register. Where Sanctuary's world is a transforming wilderness, Vigil's is interior: warm light held inside a house after loss.
The signature: a candle in a window
Vigil's one unforgettable image. The founding document names the palette's intent exactly: bone and amber read like interior light, a lamp in a window, the color inside a house. So the brand makes that literal. The candle is presence; the window faces a dusk that does not resolve. It is the mark, the hero image, and the emotional anchor across every surface.
- The candle is always lit. It is never shown extinguished, never smoking out. Vigil keeps watch.
- The window changes with the loss, not the candle: steady and warm for death; one pane closed for estrangement; fogged glass for disappearance.
- It is a quiet domestic candle, a lamp in a window, never a ceremonial pillar. The tone is intimate, not funereal.
The wordmark
Set in Nunito, always lowercase, with generous letter-spacing, one word, two syllables, no punctuation. The flame mark sits to its left and may also stand alone. Clear space on all sides equals the cap-height of the wordmark. Never stretch the wordmark, recolor it amber, swap its typeface, or add a tagline lockup. The tagline lives as separate copy, never glued to the mark.
Colour
The §VIII palette, with three working tones added for depth. Amber is candlelight, an accent only. Body text is always Slate or Stone; amber is never used for running text.
Amber on Bone does not meet AA contrast for body text, by design, it is light, not ink. Keep all running copy in Stone or Slate on Bone. Reserve Amber for short labels, accents, and the candle itself.
Typography
are still here
Nunito carries every narrative surface, Wren's voice, letters, the Archive, marketing headlines. Its soft, rounded letterforms give grief gentleness without performing it. There is no separate display typeface: Vigil has no ceremony voice. The tone is intimate, not ceremonial.
DM Sans handles only structural chrome, navigation, settings, labels, metadata. It never carries emotional copy.
Motion
- Slower than Sanctuary. Transitions are long. Nothing snaps. Entering a room is a breath, not a click.
- The Fog treatment. Estrangement and disappearance states use low-opacity, overlapping layers that drift and never resolve into clarity, a design commitment to honoring ambiguity.
- The candle breathes. A soft, irregular flicker, alive, not animated-for-delight.
Imagery direction
If photography is used: warm interiors, lamplight, lived-in domestic detail, present-tense ordinary life. Never the visual clichés of grief, rain-streaked glass, black-clad silhouettes, cemeteries, wilted flowers, clasped hands. Grief in Vigil looks like a Tuesday afternoon, not a funeral.
What is never in the design
- Progress bars showing how far through grief someone is.
- Celebration animations on completing a ritual.
- Social sharing prompts of any kind, grief is not shareable content.
- Red notification dots or badges.
- Dark backgrounds. The house is always lit from within.
Quieter than Sanctuary. The voice follows the grief.
Sanctuary can hold intensity. Heartbreak has velocity. Grief is slower, so Vigil's voice is plainer and stiller. It is warm, never solemn; honest, never falsely hopeful.
The register
- Plain. Short sentences. Common words. No therapeutic jargon, no invented vocabulary beyond the world terms.
- Honest about uncertainty. Vigil does not pretend to know how long this takes.
- Not solemn. The house is not a funeral. Grieving people also laugh, eat, watch television, have ordinary Tuesdays.
- Never performatively sad. The brand is not draped in black. The design and the words are not heavy.
Words we use, words we avoid
Use
Avoid
Sample copy
Vigil is a companion for the long middle of grief, after a death, an estrangement, or a disappearance. Write letters to the one you lost. Keep what carries their presence. Sit with Wren, a companion who witnesses rather than fixes. Vigil does not move you through grief. It keeps watch beside you. The grief work is free, and stays free.
Vigil's notifications are rare and gentle, never re-engagement nags, never streaks, never a red dot. On an anniversary the Keeper has marked, a single quiet line: "Today is one of your dates. Wren is here if you want company." That is the loudest Vigil ever gets.
The clinical boundary
Every surface (onboarding, marketing, support) states plainly that Vigil is not therapy and does not simulate it. The 988 line is always one tap away. Vigil never claims to treat, cure, or resolve grief. In copy it is a companion, never a treatment.
The companion built for stillness.
Wren is patient above all else. It has no agenda for when grief should move or what it should look like. It witnesses without interpreting, holds the Archive, and knows the difference between the three griefs. Wren does not help you heal, Wren helps you not be alone while you do.
What Wren asks
What Wren never says
These phrases are not banned because they are untrue. They are banned because they close the conversation instead of holding it open. Wren also speaks to each loss differently (estrangement grief is not death grief; disappearance grief is not either) and surfaces the Witness network or clinical support without ever framing it as failure.
Lock the model and the system prompt during Phase 0. Maintain a fixed evaluation set of grief scenarios across all three loss types, including crisis-adjacent cases, and run it before every release. Every instance of Wren surfacing 988 is logged and reviewed. A grief-informed clinical advisor signs off on Wren's behavior before launch. Wren's defensibility is its long memory of the Archive, protect that continuity above new features.
Fifteen weeks to the window.
From today to launch is roughly fifteen weeks. The v1 scope is deliberately lean. The founding document already drew it tight. The roadmap below protects the core grief work and is honest about what should be deferred to hold the September 4 date.
Protect: the Letter, the Archive, Wren, the three worlds, the clinical boundary. These are Vigil. Defer if the date is at risk: the physical Archive journal moves to Q4, printing and shipping operations cannot be stood up well in fifteen weeks. The Witness Circle ships as a small curated v1, not an automated network. Both are named in the founding document's §XII as legitimately open.
The same doctrine as Sanctuary, quieter.
Vigil's go-to-market mirrors Sanctuary's posture: restrained, word-of-mouth, community-and-witness-led, never growth-hacked. A grief product cannot be marketed like a habit app, and Martori would not want it to be.
Positioning & category
Vigil is a grief companion, not a "mental health app," not a "meditation app," not a "grief tracker." It sits adjacent to clinical care and explicitly outside it. The word is companion, everywhere.
The six GTM principles
- Healing is never gated. The free core is the whole offer; nothing is held back to force conversion.
- Anti-engagement. We never market time-in-app. Success is the practice taking root.
- Word of mouth over paid acquisition. Grief support travels through trust, not ads.
- The Witness network is the engine. Every Witness is an anchored, returning Keeper and a referral surface. A Keeper who becomes a Witness stays, because leaving would mean abandoning someone.
- Grief is not shareable content. No social mechanics, no "share your loss" prompts, no virality stunts.
- Restraint in press. Founder-led, careful, never an exploitative human-interest angle.
Channels
- Search & editorial. People actively search for grief support. A small library of honest essays (estrangement grief especially, which is underserved and stigmatized) becomes the organic front door.
- Community. Grief-adjacent communities, online and local. Estrangement and disappearance communities are tight-knit and badly served by existing tools.
- Referral. Therapists, hospices, and grief counselors can refer the non-clinical "long middle" to Vigil, the warm-handoff doctrine working in both directions. Depends on the §08 clinical-partnership decision.
- The Witness network. Built-in referral; a Witness brings the people they know.
- Founder essay. One careful piece on the Martori thesis, a studio for the losses that remake us, published on launch day.
- Email. Low-frequency, gentle, never re-engagement spam.
Pricing communication
Free core, front and center, with no card and no clock. Vigil Sovereign ($8/month or $64/year) is stated plainly and never pushed: no countdown timers, no "limited time," no upsell interruptions inside the grief work. Embers are earned only through practice, never purchased. Revenue comes from Sovereign and the physical journal, never from the grief itself.
Metrics that matter, and the ones we refuse
We measure
We refuse to optimize
The north-star is the second letter, the moment the practice takes root. A grief companion that someone uses less over years is not a failing product; it may be a working one.
Risks & sensitivities
- App store health-claims review. Vigil must never claim to treat grief. "Companion," never "treatment." Clinical-boundary copy in the listing itself.
- Crisis liability. The 988 handoff and clinical boundary must be airtight, with clinical-advisor sign-off before submission.
- Tone risk. Any marketing that feels like it monetizes or aestheticizes grief is brand-fatal. Every asset passes the brand-promise test.
Launch Vigil as "a Martori product, from the studio behind Sanctuary", a quiet attribution, not a universe crossover. Sanctuary's existence is credibility: proof Martori builds for emotional loss with care. But Vigil must stand in its own grief, not be framed as "Sanctuary 2." Hold the full universe reveal, a Keeper and a Wanderer recognizing each other, for a later, deliberate moment. This is a §08 decision; the recommendation is soft attribution at launch.
Launch week: August 31 to September 6.
A Friday launch suits Vigil: a quieter news day, a softer entrance. The week is run for steadiness, not spectacle.
The open questions, with recommendations.
These are the founding document's §XII open questions, framed as a decision log. Each carries a recommendation and a deadline. All must be locked in Phase 0. They shape build scope, GTM, and the launch date itself.