Identity
Four concepts, four rounds, one mark
Everything is on this sheet, including the three concepts that were killed and why. The colour is one flat solved ink, #5D7E92, relative luminance 0.193 — inside the window (roughly 0.125–0.300) where a single colour clears 3:1 against both the lightest and the darkest of this theme's twelve palette grounds. Measured worst case: 3.69:1.
No gradient, for three reasons. It is solvable without one. This mark
contains a perfectly horizontal bar, and a gradient left at the default
objectBoundingBox units is degenerate on a zero-height
bounding box — the element is then not rendered at all, so a gradient
here would silently delete the door head in the favicon and the header.
And a decorative gradient would be the one un-checkable thing on a site
whose entire argument is checkability.
Round 1 — four concepts
Rendered at 128, 64, 32 and 24 on both a light and a dark ground, because an icon that needs interior detail fails first at button size.
- B — killed.A ring with a gap at the top and a stroke down the middle is the universal power symbol. Unmistakably so at every size. No refinement recovers it.
- C — killed.Reads as a pair of parentheses, and two thin
arcs disappear at 24px. The idea survived: punctuation became the
bracketmenu style instead, where it is the right register. - D — killed.Wide, with a filled top panel and an open bottom, it reads as a table.
- A — carried, then disqualified.Strong at 128 and mush at 24 (five radial bars merge). More decisively, a semicircular fanlight is an arch, and arches are Studio Calm's declared visual language — the theme already serving this category group.
Round 2 — the rectangular transom
A Georgian Lancaster terrace has a rectangular transom light — a glazed panel over the door, divided by vertical mullions. No arch, correct to the building, and a silhouette that carries meaning with no interior detail.
E1 was three equal fat panes and read as a battery. E2's lintel fixed the "above something" reading. E3's jambs vanished at 24px. E5 read most clearly as a door. A2 — the fanlight rebuilt as a filled silhouette — was the best-looking mark on the sheet and is still an arch.
Round 3 — the 1:2:1 division, and the upright doorcase
Two fixes, both geometric rather than decorative. Equal panes are why it read as a battery, so the glazing went to the real Georgian division — a wide centre pane between two narrow ones. And a wide mark reads as furniture, so the whole doorcase was also tried upright.
F1 killed the battery and survived to 18px inside the primary button, but at 128 it read as a three-seat sofa — because the lintel was wider than the light and therefore read as a base the cushions sat on. G1 and G2 were legible at every size and are unmistakably the letter A.
Round 4 — one relationship under test
The transom bar's width against the light's. H1 puts the panes inside their own frame and makes the bar exactly as wide as it, so the bar reads as a glazing member rather than a base. That is the mark.
The suite
Primary lockup
Primary, on a dark ground
Stacked lockup — narrow chrome
Reversed, on the brand field
Monochrome — light ground, then dark
Size tests
The icon mark: 48 / 32 / 24 / 18 / 16
The favicon — a simplification, not the mark shrunk
The 2.6-unit frame stroke and the 2.4-unit glazing gaps both fall under one device pixel at 32, so the frame is dropped, the gaps widen and the door head thickens. Same object, drawn for the size.
