Identity sheet
The mark, and the four it beat
Everything below is hand-authored SVG. The concepts and the dead iterations are kept on the sheet on purpose: the reasoning is part of the deliverable.
Colour strategy — palette-neutral, self-sufficient gradient. A theme logo ships
as a data URL, and a data URL cannot read page CSS, so the mark can never re-tint
itself when the customer switches palette. Rather than pretend otherwise, the mark
carries its own ochre gradient — the company's actual material — and every light
area in it is real transparency rather than white, so whatever the page is
painted shows through the cut. That is why it holds on cream, on near-black, and
against the teal and ultramarine palettes. The one variant that uses
currentColor is the monochrome, which is inline-only for exactly this
reason and is not what the theme file ships.
Round one
Three concepts, drawn to be compared
A · the muller
The tool in profile on its slab. Warm and literal — and at any size below 40px it reads as a bell or a table lamp. Dropped.
B · the seam
A core through the ochre band. Honest about provenance, but a striped disc is a planet. Dropped.
C · the mull stroke · taken forward
The figure-of-eight the muller is worked in, knocked out of a disc of pigment. Right idea, wrong execution: it drew an infinity symbol.
Rounds two to five
Getting the infinity symbol out of it
C2a · onto a slab
Tile plus symmetrical eight equals an app icon. Worse, not better.
C2b · opened out
Breaking the second lobe killed the infinity read and produced a large letter S. Elegant, wrong letter.
C2c · lopsided, drawn-off edge
Unequal lobes and a scraped foot. Closest of the three, still trapped in the tile.
C3a · no tile
Stroke and slab only. The app-icon problem goes away and takes all the mass with it.
C3b · the stroke changes state
The idea that survives: cut out of the pigment where it has been worked, drawn in ochre where it has not.
C4 · one turn too far
Spiralling the cut gave it energy and a snail shell.
C5 · mass restored
Half a turn, more body. One thing left: the curl still closed on itself at the centre.
Final · the cut opens
The curl stops before it closes, so the eye follows the stroke out of the smear instead of round it.
The suite
Six variants, each with a job
1 · primary lockup
Header default, and the one that ships in THEME.json as the data URL.
2 · stacked
Narrow chrome and square placements.
3 · icon mark
Mobile header, avatar, stamp.
4 · monochrome (inline, currentColor)
Takes the ink of whatever sets it — flip the page to dark and this one follows. Inline only.
5 · reversed
For brand-filled fields such as the favMullSeam band. The cut stays transparent, so the brand colour reads through the stroke.
6 · favicon
Redrawn, not shrunk: field pushed to the edges, cut widened 6.5 → 9, tail removed because below 20px it fuses into a nick.
Size test
96, 48, 32, 24, 16 — actual pixels
Proof
The static mark against all six palettes
These six panels are painted with the raw palette values rather than tokens, because the point is to show the one asset that cannot follow the tokens. Use the switcher at the bottom right to check the rest of the page as well.
Light 1 · Red Ochre
Light 2 · Verditer
Light 3 · Lead & Lapis
Dark 1 · Red Ochre
Dark 2 · Verditer
Dark 3 · Lead & Lapis
The wordmark
Constructed, not set
Every letter is a monoline skeleton on one grid: cap height 40, stroke 7, flat
terminals, and a single 8.25 joining radius shared by B, O, R and U. No font is
involved, so the lockup renders identically inline, as an <img>
and inside a data URL — which a wordmark set in a webfont does not.
The ampersand is drawn as one continuous skeleton crossing at the waist.