Ink: foundation
The heavy lower arm. The structural work everything else stands on. It sits underneath the brass, because it has to.
Case study
Our own identity, built like client work.
A studio that cannot apply its own rules should not be selling rules. So this was scoped, audited, argued and documented exactly the way a client project is, with the same deadlines and the same refusal to keep a second direction alive.
The idea
An X with one arm turned into an arrow.
The mark is an X in three colours. One of its strokes carries on past the crossing and becomes an arrow pointing up and to the right, and the arrowhead has already left the shaft.
Each colour is one stage of the work, in the order a client goes through them. The gap between the shaft and the head is the moment the brand leaves the studio and goes out into the market. It is deliberate, and it is the part of the mark people are most tempted to "fix".
What the mark says
Three arms, three stages.
Parchment: identity
The light upper arm. Logo, brand system, themes and templates: the layer that gives a company a face before it goes out into the world.
Brass: growth
The stroke that crosses both, and the arrowhead that has already flown ahead of it. Up and to the right, and out into the market.
What we made
One master, one palette, one wordmark.
The mark
Everything is drawn from a single 100 by 100 master. Both diagonals sit at exactly 45 degrees and cross at the centre. All three arms share a stroke width of 14 units with round caps, and that stroke width is also the unit for clear space around the mark.
The brass shaft is drawn on top of the other two arms and stops short of the head. The arrowhead is a right-angled triangle, the only sharp shape in the mark, floating on the same 45-degree line with a clear gap between it and the shaft's cap. The layer order never changes: parchment, ink, brass shaft, arrowhead.
The palette
The colour came from a physical object rather than a screen: an unlacquered brass door plate, sampled at the brightest and darkest points of the same surface. That is why the golds sit slightly green rather than orange. Ink is a warm near-black rather than black, and the two light surfaces, parchment and bone, are never pure white, because pure white behind warm gold makes the gold look dirty.
Brass#C89A46
Brass 300#DCB66C
Brass 200#E8CD96
Brass 700#856027
Ink#26252B
Parchment#F1E7D6
Bone#FAF7F2
On dark surfaces the parchment arm steps up to Brass 300 so it still separates from the shaft, and the ink arm swaps to parchment. The brass never changes. Full-strength brass fails contrast against the light surfaces at body size, so gold text under 24 pixels uses Brass 700. This site follows that rule.
The wordmark
The wordmark is set in Sora SemiBold, tracked in tight, all lowercase except a capital brass X. The X is the only capital and the only coloured letter, so it is the single point of emphasis and it echoes the mark beside it.
The casing rules are written down so nobody has to guess: brandzaX in the logo, BrandzaX in running text, and brandzax only where lowercase is forced, like the domain and email address.
Applications
Every version drawn from the same master.
Nothing is redrawn by eye. Each version below is produced from the one master file, so the gap and the angles stay exact at every size.
Full colour
On bone and on parchment, for any background we control.
Reversed on ink
The primary surface. Hero, deck covers and social templates lead with it.
Knocked out on brass
All-white mark for brass backgrounds.
Single colour
Ink, brass and parchment cuts for embroidery, engraving and stamps.
Horizontal lockup
The primary lockup, for the site header, email signature and deck footer.
Stacked lockup
For print, merchandise and anything vertically generous.
Lockup with descriptor
Mark, wordmark and a spaced-caps descriptor line.
App icon and avatars
Ink tile with the mark at 66 per cent, a circle crop for social, and a brass alternate.
Favicons
48, 32 and 16 pixels. The gap holds down to 32; at 16 it closes, which is accepted.
Rules of use
The rules we hold ourselves to.
A system nobody can break by accident is mostly a matter of writing the rules down. These are the ones that protect the idea behind the mark, not just its appearance.
Minimum size is 20 pixels on screen and 6mm in print for the mark alone, and 120 pixels or 30mm for the horizontal lockup.
- The arrowhead stays detached. Joining it to the shaft makes a different logo.
- The arrow always points up and to the right. Never rotated or mirrored.
- Brass stays on top of the other two arms in every version.
- No new colours, gradients, shadows or outlines.
- Always scaled proportionally, from the master file.
This is how we would write up yours.
Including the last section. If you want a studio that will tell you what it got wrong on the previous project, start here.