Identity working notes
The Lintel mark: three concepts to a final suite
A lintel is the beam that carries the load over a doorway. The winning idea reads that literally — two bearing legs rising to the point of greatest load — and also anatomically, as two bones meeting at a joint. Kept here with the dead ends, because the reasoning is part of the work.
1 · Three concepts
The literal doorway lintel: straight jambs, straight beam. Dead end — reads as a goalpost or a table, not a mark.
Two bone-ends bridged by a bar. Dead end — reads as generic gym/dumbbell iconography and loses the architectural half of the name.
A spirit-level and plumb-bob: precision and alignment. Dead end — reads as a surveying instrument, loses the load-bearing idea entirely.
2 · Four iterations
None of the three concepts won outright. The final mark took the arch curve that started in A, the joint idea from B, and the precision-mark idea from C, and iterated until all three were the same shape.
A's straight jambs softened into curves, stapled to a flat beam. Better — reads as an arch — but the flat segment looks bolted on.
One unbroken path with a shallow concave crown — the bearing-sag. Reads as a single arch now, but has lost the joint idea completely.
Split the crown open again and bridged the gap with a filled pin. The joint from B and the precision mark from C land on the same shape at once.
Proportions tightened, gradient and halo added for cross-palette legibility (see §4). Promoted to logo-mark.svg.
3 · The wordmark
Constructed, not set: every letter in LINTEL is built from straight monoline strokes on a shared grid (cap height 40, stroke 7, round caps and joins) — no font is involved, so it renders identically inline, as an <img>, and inside a data URL. L, I, N, T and E all happen to be rectilinear, which is what makes this feasible by hand.
4 · Final suite — six variants
Mark + wordmark, horizontal. Ships as THEME.json's logo field.
Mark above wordmark, for narrow/mobile chrome.
Tested legible at 24px below.
currentColor — inline-only, not for a data URL.
For a brand-coloured field, e.g. the footer band.
A 32px redraw, not the mark shrunk (see §5).
5 · Size test
The open linework of logo-mark.svg holds at 24px. It does not survive to 16px, which is why the favicon is a separate, chunkier redraw rather than the mark reused smaller.
64px32px24px — still readsFavicon, 32pxFavicon, 16px6 · Legibility across all six palettes
The primary lockup carries its own fixed teal→terracotta gradient rather than re-tinting to the page palette (a static data-URL logo cannot read page CSS). A low-opacity white halo sits behind the strokes: invisible on a light background, and enough separation to hold on a near-black one. Use the palette switcher bottom-right to check this against the live page chrome, and the fixed dark tiles below for the mark alone.