A · winnowing arc
Identity sheet
Winnow — the mark, and how it got there
Four concepts, drawn and rejected in public; four passes on the winner; a separate small-size cut; three favicon studies and three wordmark studies. The alternates are left on the sheet because the reasoning is the deliverable.
1 · Four concepts
Drawn side by side at 96, 48 and 24px on both a light and a dark field, because a mark that only works at hero size is not a mark.
48
24
reversed
Winner, but not as drawn. It is the verb the business is named for — heavy grain falls, light chaff lifts. But the grain is too narrow and reads as a leaf, the chaff is sub-pixel by 24px, and the mass all sits left.
B · accession mount
48
24
Rejected. Holds at 24px better than any of the others — the frame survives. But a box with a thing inside it is every document icon ever drawn. Nothing here belongs to a seed library specifically.
C · winnowing fan
48
24
Rejected. The best silhouette of the four at large size. At 24px the settling grain merges into the bowl and it turns into a smiling face. Not recoverable without dropping the seed, which is the whole subject.
D · sheaf W
48
24
Rejected. The most legible at every size, and the least owned — it is a letterform with a dot next to it. The brief warns off font-only marks and this is one in spirit.
2 · Four passes on concept A
Each pass fixes one named fault. Nothing here is a restyle.
v1 · baseline
v2 · plumped + crease
v3 · tilted, re-struck
v4 · small-size cut
- v2 — width:height taken from 0.40 to 0.55 so it stops reading as a leaf, and the crease becomes a knockout (one compound path,
fill-rule="evenodd") instead of a stroke painted in the page colour. That single change is what lets the mark sit on any of the theme's twelve fields with no backing plate. - v3 — grain rotated −13° so it falls rather than stands; chaff arc re-struck off the tip; optical centring, since the arc throws the visual mass right.
- v4 — a genuinely separate cut for small sizes: two chaff dots instead of three, everything enlarged. At 24px the third dot of v3 is 0.75px wide and simply is not there.
Size ladder, both cuts
v3 · 64
v3 · 32
v3 · 24 (thin)
v4 · 32
v4 · 24 ✓
v4 · 16
3 · Three wordmark studies
Hand-drawn stroked geometry, not type. The register is a stamped seed packet, which is why it is a stencil sitting deliberately against Newsreader on the page rather than imitating it.
A — rejected: round caps, splayed W, circular O. Reads as a marker pen.
B — cap height up, narrower, butt caps, mitred joins, W apex raised
C ✓ chosen — the counter of the O becomes a seed, cut with the mark's own crease
150
100
4 · Favicon — a simplification, not the mark shrunk
Three changes from the mark, because 32px is a different medium: the chaff is dropped entirely, the grain is plumped from 0.56 to 0.70, and it becomes a knockout on a filled tile — which is how a browser tab actually presents a favicon.
A — 0.56, reads as a coffee bean
32
B — 0.70, crease narrowed
32
C ✓ shipped
32 — the bar
24
16
32 on dark chrome
5 · The shipped suite
Primary lockup
Stacked lockup
Icon mark alone — tested at 24px
left three: small cut · right: full three-chaff cut for large use
Monochrome
Painted in currentColor, so inline it takes the page's ink in every palette and both modes. Note the caveat: currentColor has nothing to resolve against once inlined as a data URL, so this variant is for inline use only.
on paper
on ink
Reversed — for brand-coloured fields
on brand
on accent
6 · Palette neutrality — the proof, not the claim
A theme logo ships as a data URL and a data URL cannot read page CSS. So the
shipped lockup carries a self-sufficient two-stop gradient
(#A8683A → #6E8A5A) rather than relying on currentColor.
Both stops — and every interpolated point along the ramp — were solved to clear
3:1 against all twelve fields the theme can present: six
backgrounds and six surfaces. Worst point measured on the whole ramp: 3.34:1.
Below is the same file on all twelve.