This document defines the durable strategic foundation of the established Navet brand. It is not a list of current features and it does not introduce a new tagline or positioning.
For current provider support, feature depth, counts, and installation paths, use the integration capability matrix, current product, and release documentation.
Foundation at a Glance
| Element | Definition |
|---|---|
| Name | Navet, Swedish for the hub |
| Category | Self-hosted smart-home dashboard |
| Established public descriptor | A smart home dashboard for every screen. |
| Product role | A focused daily control surface for the smart-home platforms people already use |
| Primary audience | People who operate self-hosted smart homes and want a calmer interface across household screens |
| Character | Calm, deliberate, warm, clear, open, and practical |
| Enduring ideas | Room-first control, local ownership, screen adaptability, honest provider support, and open-source participation |
The public descriptor is established copy, not a prompt to generate alternate taglines. Use it when a headline-level descriptor is needed; use a factual product description when more context is required.
Name and Meaning
Navet is pronounced NAH-vet. It is the definite form of the Swedish word nav: the hub, the central point that connects a system.
The meaning explains the name and the hub mark. It should not dominate routine product copy. Tell the origin once when it adds context; do not turn every headline into a wheel, spoke, center, or connection metaphor.
Write Navet with an initial capital in prose. Lowercase navet is appropriate in URLs, package
names, commands, identifiers, and other code contexts.
Purpose
Navet exists to make the connected home easier to understand and control in everyday life.
That purpose is expressed through a room-first interface, glanceable live state, direct household actions, and consistent behavior across the screens already in a home. It is not expressed through more configuration, more decoration, or a claim to replace the underlying smart-home platform.
Promise
Navet gives people a calm, focused daily surface for the home while keeping their provider as the source of truth and keeping control of the setup in their hands.
The promise has four parts:
- Understand the home quickly. Important state and exceptions are visible before secondary detail.
- Act without friction. Common household controls are direct, tactile, and close at hand.
- Stay familiar across screens. The interface adapts from wall panels to phones without becoming a different product.
- Keep ownership. Navet is local-first, self-hosted, and open source; claims about data and credentials must remain precise.
Positioning
Navet is a self-hosted smart-home dashboard for people who want everyday control to feel calmer and more coherent than an administration-first interface or a collection of separately maintained panels.
It connects to supported smart-home platforms and presents their available capabilities through a shared, room-first experience. The connected provider continues to run the home. Navet makes that setup easier to use.
This positioning deliberately avoids three claims:
- Navet is not the automation platform or device source of truth.
- Navet does not promise identical capabilities across providers.
- Navet is not a managed cloud service.
Audience
Primary audience
People who already operate a self-hosted smart home and want a polished daily interface for wall panels, tablets, desktops, or phones. This includes the person maintaining the system and the other people in the household who should not need to understand its administration model.
Navet is designed to help them:
- find controls by room and purpose instead of navigating technical entity structures
- check live household state in a few seconds
- give different household screens a consistent interaction model
- reduce the maintenance burden of a collection of custom dashboards
- keep the dashboard and smart-home data under their control
Secondary audience
Contributors, provider maintainers, designers, and developers who want to improve an open, provider-neutral smart-home interface without making one provider’s implementation the entire product architecture.
Not the promise
Navet is not positioned for someone who wants a fully managed cloud service, expects every advanced feature on every provider, or does not want to operate a self-hosted application. State those limits plainly instead of stretching the brand to fit every possible user.
The Human Tension
Smart-home systems can be powerful for the person who configures them and tiring for the people who only want to use the home. Default interfaces often serve administration and everyday control at the same time. Fully custom dashboards can feel personal but require continued design and maintenance.
Navet resolves that tension by being opinionated about the daily layer: room-first organization, clear live state, familiar controls, and a consistent visual grammar. The emotional outcome is not novelty. It is the quiet confidence that the home can be understood and controlled without a manual.
Enduring Differentiation
Room-first, not admin-first
Navet organizes everyday control around places and household purposes. Technical provider detail is available when it helps, but it does not lead the experience.
One interaction model across household screens
Navet is designed to remain familiar from a shared wall display to a personal phone. Responsive behavior changes composition and density, not the identity of the product.
Local ownership
Navet is built for self-hosted smart homes. It does not require a Navet cloud account, and the product promise is that provider data, dashboard state, and credentials remain on the user’s own device or server rather than Navet-operated servers. Public website analytics are a separate surface and must not be confused with this product-data promise.
Provider choice without false parity
Navet has a provider-neutral product direction, but provider capabilities can differ. Shared UI should feel coherent while public copy remains specific about what each supported integration can do today.
Open source without unfinished-product language
Open source means people can inspect, self-host, contribute to, and help shape Navet. It is not an excuse for rough presentation, speculative capability claims, or maintainer jargon in household surfaces.
Brand Principles
These are internal decision principles, not public slogans.
1. State before spectacle
Show what is happening in the home before adding atmosphere or explanation. Decoration supports hierarchy; it never competes with live state or the primary action.
2. Household language before system language
Say Kitchen island, No alerts, or Nothing playing when that is what a person needs to know. Reserve entity IDs, payloads, adapters, and capability vocabulary for technical contexts.
3. Direct control with visible agency
The common action should be obvious. Loading, connection, and error states should show what is happening and provide a safe recovery or cancellation path when waiting may be prolonged.
4. Warmth through restraint
Navet is welcoming because it is clear, tactile, and grounded in the home. It does not need exclamation marks, mascots, forced jokes, excessive color, or constant motion to feel human.
5. Consistency without sameness
Marketing, docs, and product cards have different jobs. They share geometry, hierarchy, tone, and care while adapting composition to their context.
6. Honest capability over broad appeal
State what is supported, where, and under which conditions. A narrower accurate claim strengthens the brand more than a universal claim that the product cannot keep.
7. Product proof over abstract promise
Use the real dashboard, live demo, current documentation, and open code as evidence. Do not replace the product with generic technology imagery, invented testimonials, or unverified metrics.
8. Accessibility and performance are identity
Readable contrast, comfortable touch targets, keyboard focus, reduced motion, responsive density, and restrained effects are part of how Navet feels dependable. They are not optional polish.
Personality
| Trait | Navet is | Navet is not |
|---|---|---|
| Calm | Composed, focused, and easy to scan | Empty, vague, or passive |
| Deliberate | Precise in hierarchy, spacing, state, and wording | Ornamental or precious |
| Warm | At home in a real household; tactile and approachable | Cute, jokey, or overfamiliar |
| Clear | Direct about outcomes, actions, limits, and recovery | Blunt, simplistic, or full of jargon |
| Open | Transparent about code, direction, support, and gaps | Speculative, unfinished, or careless |
| Practical | Grounded in real screens, real state, and daily use | Abstract, trend-led, or feature-theatrical |
When traits compete, clarity and trust win. For example, an error may become more direct without becoming alarming, and a security message may become more precise without becoming cold.
Brand Architecture
Master brand
Navet is the product and the master brand. The website, demo, docs, Storybook, packages, and official deployment forms are surfaces of Navet, not separate consumer brands.
Use descriptive labels when a distinction matters:
- Navet website
- Navet demo
- Navet documentation or Navet docs
- Navet Storybook
- Navet add-on
- Navet custom panel
- Navet standalone
- Navet Dev for the established development release line
Do not invent names such as Navet Cloud, Navet Home, Navet OS, Navet Pro, or provider edition sub-brands without an explicit product and brand decision.
Providers
Home Assistant, Homey, openHAB, and any future providers are integrations with Navet. Use their official names and marks according to their policies. Provider marks indicate compatibility or a connection path; they do not replace the Navet identity or imply endorsement.
Prefer:
- Navet for a Home Assistant setup in explanatory prose
- Connect Home Assistant for an action
- Home Assistant integration for a capability or implementation
Avoid using Home Assistant dashboard as Navet’s product category or implying that Navet belongs to a provider.
Community work and forks
Community contributions can remain part of the Navet project. Independently distributed forks must follow the trademark policy and should use their own product identity rather than presenting a modified distribution as official Navet.
Message Pillars
The pillars remain stable; their supporting product facts must be refreshed.
| Pillar | Enduring message | Suitable evidence |
|---|---|---|
| Everyday control | Find what matters by room, understand the state, and act without admin-screen clutter | Real cards, dashboard flows, and demo tasks |
| Every screen | Keep a familiar Navet experience across shared and personal screens | Current wall-panel, tablet, desktop, and phone captures |
| Local ownership | Run Navet yourself and keep smart-home data and credentials on your device or server | Architecture, security guidance, and verified data flows |
| Provider choice | Use a supported platform through a coherent dashboard without pretending capability parity | Current capability matrix and installation guides |
| Open participation | Inspect the code, self-host it, contribute, and follow what comes next | Repository, contribution guide, changelog, and roadmap |
Proof Standard
The brand is strongest when it shows the product. Approved forms of proof include:
- current, unmodified product UI and task-based demonstrations
- the public demo, documentation, Storybook, and repository
- a dated capability matrix or release note
- reproducible technical behavior and documented architecture
- verified, permissioned customer words or metrics when those sources eventually exist
There are currently no repository-verified customer testimonials, customer logos, business outcomes, or adoption metrics that should be treated as standing brand proof. Do not invent or approximate them. GitHub activity and stars may be shown as live community signals when clearly labeled; they are not evidence of a customer outcome.
What Changes and What Does Not
| Durable foundation | Changing product fact |
|---|---|
| Navet is room-first | The rooms, sections, and card types available in a release |
| Navet is made for every household screen | The exact supported breakpoints, devices, and screenshots |
| Navet is local-first and self-hosted | The current storage paths, deployment modes, and provider auth flows |
| Navet supports provider choice honestly | The provider list and capability depth |
| Navet is open source | The roadmap, contributor count, issue state, and release cadence |
| Navet feels calm, tactile, and direct | The exact page composition, animation, and component implementation |
Update a changing fact at its source. Change a durable foundation only through explicit brand review.
Foundation Test
Before approving a major expression, ask:
- Does it make the real home easier to understand or control?
- Does it feel grounded in Navet’s current product rather than a generic technology brand?
- Is the main user outcome or action clearer than the decoration?
- Could it belong to the website, docs, or product without contradicting the other two?
- Are local-first, provider, security, and roadmap claims precise and current?
- Does it preserve the established name, marks, color role, typography, and product character?
If any answer is no, revise the expression rather than expanding the brand to justify it.