Marchmont — identity sheet

Concepts, iterations and final suite. Everything hand-authored; no clip-art, no font-only wordmark. Kept in full so the reasoning is visible.

Round 1 — three concepts

Property marks conventionally do one of three things: a monogram, an architectural glyph, or an abstract geometric. One of each, so the choice is between directions rather than between drafts of the same idea.

Read at 120px: A is legible but the ledger rules read as a strike-through, and an M with lines behind it is a logotype trick, not a mark. C is conceptually the tightest — an accounting bracket enclosing a roof says "property, accounted for" — but the bracket is thin at small sizes and the chevron reads as a generic house. B wins: a Georgian fanlight is property-native, symmetric, and sits over a double rule — the line an accountant draws under a total. It is the only one of the three that carries both halves of this theme's argument. Taking B forward.

Round 2 — refining B

Four passes on the winner. The problems to solve: the bars converge into a blob at small sizes, the double rule is fussy, and the arc weight needs to hold against the bar weight.

B.1 · as drawn

B.2 · bars pulled out, 2nd rule cut

B.3 · heavier, rule restored shorter

B.4 · final geometry

B.1 the five bars converge on a point and mud up below ~40px. B.2 pulling the bars outward fixes that, but losing the second rule loses the accounting reference and the mark floats. B.3 restores a shorter second rule and adds weight — nearly right, arc a touch tall. B.4 arc dropped 1px, weights up to 3.2/2.4, second rule tightened to 22 units. This is the mark: the bars clear the hub, the two rules read as a ledger total, and the whole thing survives 24px. B.4 adopted.

Size test — the 24px bar

The brief's hard requirement: the icon mark must read at 24px. Shown at true size, no scaling tricks.

Favicon — a simplification, not a shrink

At 32px the five bars and two rules collapse. The favicon drops to three bars and one rule, and thickens everything: the same idea rebuilt for the size rather than the mark scaled down.

Round 3 — optical alignment of the lockup

The first lockup aligned the mark's bounding box to the wordmark, which is the obvious move and the wrong one: the mark's optical centre is its rule, not its middle, so it floated visibly high. Fixed by landing the primary rule exactly on the wordmark baseline and the top of the centre glazing bar on the cap height.

33 × 1.35 + 1.45 = 46.00 — the rule lands exactly on the text baseline. 15.8 × 1.35 + 1.45 = 22.78 — the centre bar reaches Faustina's cap height at 34px. Scaling the mark from 1.0 to 1.35 also fixes the second complaint: at parity the mark read as a bullet point beside the word rather than as half of a lockup.

The six variants

1 · primary lockup

2 · stacked

3 · icon alone

4a · mono, on light

4b · mono, on dark

5 · reversed on brand

6 · favicon

The data-URL problem, and how it was solved

A theme logo ships inside THEME.json as a data URL. It therefore cannot read page CSS and cannot use currentColor — it renders in whatever colour is baked into it, on whichever of the six palettes happens to be active. The brand green of the primary lockup measures 1.42:1 on Ledger Night: invisible.

So the shipped colour was solved rather than chosen: #55806F is the mid-tone of the brand green that clears WCAG's 3:1 non-text bar against all six backgrounds and all six surfaces. Measured worst case 3.69:1. Every swatch below is the identical file — one colour, no per-palette variants, no plate.

Regulator badge space

Lettings has a badge convention — ARLA Propertymark, TPO, a CMP scheme, Safeagent. Real regulator marks are deliberately not reproduced here. What ships is the space they go in: a fixed-height rule-bounded strip with the correct optical rhythm, drawn as neutral placeholders so a real agency drops its own certified badges straight in.

REGULATED BY badge slot badge slot badge slot badge slot

badge strip — 34px cap height, 26px gutters, rule above