CDMX brand
guidelines

What SLIST CDMX is

SLIST is a dark taste movement. The Mexico City chapter is the origin chapter — the place where the community model, the guestlist-as-currency idea, and the chapter playbook were tested first. Everything the NYC operation does today was rehearsed here.

SLIST CDMX is not a separate brand. It is the same brand, operating in a different language and a different city. One Instagram. One design system. One voice. The only thing that shifts is the register — and only where the register has to.

The four pillars

• Rituals — the events themselves, the gathering
• The voice — the sound, the curation, the taste
• Sigils — the visual identity, the marks, the design language
• The machine — the infrastructure, the operations, the systems that scale

Position

SLIST is the container for people with dark taste to find each other, mark themselves, and build something that feels like home. In CDMX that means navigating a scene with longer memory and tighter relationships than New York's. The chapter operates as a connective node, not the loudest voice in the room.

Dark, not hostile. Intense, not reckless. Selective, not exclusionary. We protect the room, the artists, and the energy.

Three colors. Nothing else.

The palette is a hard constraint. There is no CDMX accent color, no "warmer" red for Mexico, no concession to local taste. The rawness is the signal. Anything sophisticated dilutes it.

Rules

• Background is always near-black. Never white. Never pastel. Never warm beige even when "the photo would look better."
• Red is the only accent. Never substituted, never tinted, never gradient-extended.
• Pure #FF0000 has been retired. Canonical red is #B91C1C — blood, not stoplight. Older assets get migrated, not preserved.
• No blue, neon, pastel, gradient meshes, or "moody purple haze" filters.

Two typefaces. One tension.

The pairing is deliberate. Times New Roman is the font everyone has and nobody chooses on purpose — institutional, raw, anti-design. Public Sans is the modern operational counterpart. Together they read as a DJ in a tuxedo: institutional and underground at the same time.

Rules

• Headings: Times New Roman, often italic for emphasis on flyers and event names
• Body / UI: Public Sans, light or regular weight
• Flyers: all caps, left-aligned. Spanish or English — never both stacked
• Captions, web copy, email: sentence case. Lowercase only in the most casual DM register
• Two typefaces maximum per piece. Adding a third reads as a student project
• No display fonts, no "edgy" grunge faces, no hand-drawn. The contrast carries the personality, not the typeface

How SLIST CDMX speaks

Minimal. Heavy. Bilingual when it carries more weight in Spanish than in English. Every word is chosen, nothing is wasted.

Tone doctrine

• Sentence case is the standard everywhere except flyers
• Dark, cold, clinical — not grungy, not DIY, not "raw underground" cosplay
• Confident. Underground. Uncompromising
• Urgency without desperation. Anti-FOMO — no fake countdowns, no "last chance"
• Short sentences. Minimal punctuation. One emoji maximum, if any
• Let the content speak. Never oversell

Bilingual register

Spanish is not a translation layer. It is the origin language of the brand. Switches happen mid-sentence when a concept lands harder in one language than the other — never as decoration, never for "flavor."

• Public copy in CDMX leads in Spanish
• Formal Spanish uses usted when the moment calls for distance — it reads as polite and threatening at the same time. Use it deliberately
• Nmms, chisme, cortesía, la escena — scene-native vocabulary, never explained, never glossed for outsiders
• No machine-translated Spanish in published copy. If the copy reads as "Hola amigos, ¡estamos super emocionados!" it gets rewritten
• Code-switching is natural, not performative. If a paragraph reads cleaner in English, keep it in English

Words that belong, words that don't

The word "free"

SLIST does not use the word free. Replace with what it actually means: unpaid, included, daily, your own, on the house, cortesía. The brand register does not reach for "free" — the word flattens the meaning and reads as a sales pitch.

How CDMX events appear

Flyers are editorial objects, not sales pitches. The aspiration is the Berghain model: eventually no flyers at all, just a calendar. Until then, every flyer is a discipline.

Hierarchy on every flyer

• Event name (bold, Times New Roman, all caps)
• Headliner
• Date · venue
• Supporting acts
• Ticket link

Lead with the vibe and the brand. Never with the venue or the city. Pasaguero is not the headline. Roma Norte is not the headline. The night is.

Format

• 1080 × 1920 (9:16) is the primary format — Stories, Reels, ads
• Dark background, minimal text, left-aligned
• No QR codes on flyers. No logo watermarks. No "featuring," no "with special guest"
• Crowd shots and room shots beat artist headshots for cold ads
• Collaborators credited textually, never elevated to a sub-brand or co-logo
• Flyers stay off the main IG grid. They live in Reels and highlights — the grid stays clean

Photo / video grading

• Dark and contrasty. Never brightened to "make it more appealing"
• Red as a full-image LUT filter at roughly 50% intensity on video — never on the main flyer photo
• Old event flyers get archived to highlights, not deleted, not promoted

Examples

Where SLIST CDMX shows up

Instagram

• Captions: one to two lines maximum. Let the visual speak
• No set times published. Anywhere. Ever
• No artist bios in captions. The name is the bio
• Shitposts outperform polished flyer posts for organic reach. Lean into it when the joke is on-brand

WhatsApp

WhatsApp is the CDMX chapter's primary surface. The tiered distribution model — inner circle, chisme chat, announcement group, IG last — is doctrine, not preference. Cortesías move through the tiers in that order. Random distribution undercuts the value of being in an inner tier.

Email

• No greeting openers. Start talking
• Subject lines: six words maximum, no emoji
• Sign off with "SLIST" or nothing

SMS

• Attention-grabbing opener, venue address, ticket link. Nothing else
• CTA where applicable: TEXT "DARK" TO 833-912-4216
• STOP requests are honored on the channel and retained for ad audiences. Do not auto-filter SMS opt-outs out of Meta custom audiences

Website

• One to three sentences maximum on auto-replies and bot responses
• If unsure of a fact: "check back closer to the event." Never fabricate
• Ticket page line, always: "Dark vibes only. No set times. No artist bios. Research the lineup, or just trust our curation."

How the chapter conducts itself

SLIST CDMX is a connective node. The brand earns its position by being useful to the scene — not by being the loudest collective in it. Field reps, promoters, venues, labels: these relationships are infrastructure.

Posture

• Operate as an insider, not a tourist. Even when run remotely
• Show up at the door before announcing yourself in the DM
• Reciprocate cortesías. Reciprocate promo. Reciprocate stories
• When something breaks at a partner event, the chapter takes responsibility publicly and rebuilds privately — not the reverse
• Apologize when wrong. The chapter has done so before, and the precedent stands

Vetting

The cortesía system is not a public list. Per-profile validation is doctrine: "ensure you've validated profile by profile to avoid giving free access to drug dealers, harassers or crooks". Volume is not the goal. Quality of the room is the goal.

Bad actors

SLIST CDMX keeps a quiet blacklist. The chapter does not cut ties publicly, but warns partners privately. Documented bad actors include collectives with confirmed non-payment patterns and individuals with credible community-consensus accusations. The blacklist is operated by the chapter lead, not the public.

Allowed · not allowed · what we aim for