Scalebar · identity
Three concepts, two dead iterations, one mark
The rejected work stays on the sheet. It is the argument for the thing that shipped.
Stage one
Three genuinely different ideas
Architecture marks cluster around three things: an abstract monogram, a building silhouette, and a drawing device. Only the third says anything a client can use.
A · The scale bar
Alternating filled and open divisions on a baseline — the device every drawing carries so a reader can measure it whatever size it was printed at. Set as an L because plan and section each carry their own, and because a single horizontal bar leaves a square icon two-thirds empty.
Taken forward
B · The datum mark
The setting-out point every dimension on a site is measured from. Rejected: a cross in a circle is a crosshair, and a crosshair is the most over-used mark in professional services. It also says "surveyor" — and Surveyor is already served by counsel. Survives as a section icon, where being generic is a virtue.
Rejected — too generic
C · Poché
Wall cut through and filled solid, room left as void — the way a plan actually reads, and the most purely architectural idea of the three. Rejected: at 24px the void closes and it becomes a black square with a nick out of it. Survives as the theme's hatch texture.
Rejected — fails at 24px
Stage two
Three passes on the bar
Judged at 24px each time, because that is where a mark either works or does not.
i1 · Five divisions
Bars 6 units thick, five divisions per arm, 1.2 hairlines on the open ones. At 24px each division is 3.6px and the hairline disappears entirely, so it reads as three floating blocks. A scale bar that cannot be counted is not a scale bar.
Down to four, thicken
i2 · Butted corner
Legibility fixed, but the two arms run into each other and the corner reads as one fat square rather than as two bars meeting.
Open the corner
i3 · Final
A 2-unit gap holds the vertical arm off the horizontal, so the corner becomes the setting-out point the drawing is measured from. Both arms carry four divisions at the same rate — arms measured differently would be a drawing error, and an architect would see it. Stroke up to 1.8 so the open divisions hold at 24px.
Ships
Stage three
The 24px test, and why the favicon is redrawn
Icon mark, at size
All four divisions on both arms remain countable at 24px, which is the whole test. Below that the open divisions begin to fill in.
Favicon — two divisions, not four
At 32px a four-division arm gives each division 5px and the open ones vanish. At two divisions they are 10px and the alternation survives — which is the whole idea of a scale bar. Bars thickened 8→12, stroke 1.8→2.6, padding cut so the mark fills the box.
Stage four
The suite
1 · Primary lockup
Ships in THEME.json as the logo data URL. Wordmark in Arial Narrow — a data URL cannot load the theme's Google fonts, and Arial Narrow is the honest websafe analogue of IBM Plex Sans Condensed, which the site sets its headings in. The mark is hand-authored geometry; the wordmark is type, which is what a lockup is.
2 · Stacked lockup
Not the primary rotated: the mark moves onto the centre axis and the wordmark centres under it. Used in the footer and at mobile widths, where the horizontal lockup would shrink the mark past the point its divisions can be counted.
3 · Icon alone
Legible to 24px — tested above, not asserted.
4 · Monochrome, both ways
One flat colour, no gradient. The mark survives because it was drawn as solid-and-void divisions rather than as a colour relationship — drop the gradient and only the hue changes.
5 · Reversed on brand
Solid divisions stay paper-white and open ones keep a paper keyline. Inverting them on a brand field would make the bar read as a dashed line rather than as a measured scale.
6 · Favicon
The tab icon on all five pages of this site. Look at the browser tab.
Stage five
Against every ground it will meet
A theme logo ships as a data URL: it cannot read page CSS, cannot use currentColor, and cannot re-tint per palette. So the mark carries a self-sufficient two-stop gradient, drawing blue #3A6A9C to drawing red #B25E30 — the two pen colours of a planning drawing, where black and blue are existing and red is proposed.
Switch palette and mode bottom-right; the row re-renders against whichever of the six is active. Both stops were measured against all six palette backgrounds before the mark was drawn: worst case 3.34:1, clearing the 3:1 bar for graphical objects everywhere. An earlier blue, #2F5D8C, was discarded for failing at 2.75:1 on the dark grounds. Over photography the monochrome light variant is used instead, because no gradient survives an arbitrary image.
Stage six
What the mark taught the rest of the theme
Every icon here is a symbol lifted from a real drawing sheet, drawn on one 24-unit grid, and every one is dimensioned — closed by the pair of witness ticks that terminate a dimension line. That is what makes them one system rather than six drawings.
The trade diagram
The theme's central move, and the reason it is called Scalebar: the logo and the trade diagram are the same object at two sizes. The RIBA Plan of Work drawn as a scale bar whose divisions are sized by fee share, with a real dimension line marking where most domestic clients stop. Nothing in the block library does this, and no competitor site draws the shape of its own fee at all.