Mark
Favicon
The symbol alone, in a square tile. The tile carries the silhouette, so the mark holds at 16px against light or dark browser chrome.
Clearspace
One module, 1x, taken from the lockup itself: the gap between mark and logotype is 0.5x, so 1x is twice it. Keep 1x clear on every side. Nothing sets inside it: no type, no rule, no edge of an image.
Color
Five minerals. One accent at a time, no more.
Grayscale
Twelve steps, near-neutral gray. 01 is the paper plate, 12 is the dark plate, structure pulls from between. Even lightness steps, one held hue. The archive ground sits below the ramp and is its own token.
Typography
EB Garamond says the things worth saying. Tekio is what you actually read. Numbers are always PX Grotesk. Weight stops at 500.
Intelligence as structure
UsageCreative / campaign.
Intelligence as a structure of relationships
UsageAll headings. Scale down for H2 / H3.
Intelligence as a structure of relationships. Nodes connect, signals travel.
UsageThe claim line. That is the whole job.
Intelligence as a structure of relationships. Nodes connect, signals travel, paths thicken where the work flows.
UsageReading text.
Why Idler
Intelligence as a structure of relationships. Nodes connect, signals travel, paths thicken where the work flows.
UsageEyebrows, meta, captions, buttons. Set in the body ink, not a faded one: a term list is stated, not whispered.
01
1234567890
UsageNumbers, pass@k, IDs.
Atoms
The system’s primitive is not a shape, it is a substance. A halftone dot is not a picture of ink, it is ink, and these six are not icons standing for things: they are the material the Shell is made of. So the category is Matter, and everything under it inherits two axes. Matter has constituents, which are the three forms. Matter has states, which are solid and opened. Three by two is six, and nothing else is ever added, because you cannot add a seventh unit to a material without saying what it is made of.
- The category
- Calling it Matter is a commitment, not a flourish. An icon set can be extended whenever someone needs a new sign. A material cannot: adding to it means changing what the thing is made of, and every surface already built out of it stops agreeing. That is the whole reason the set is closed at six, and the reason the closure holds under pressure.
- The two axes
- Constituents and states. The three forms are what matter is made of; solid and opened are the two conditions it can be in. Fill and hole are one axis rather than three more units, because an opened unit is not a different thing from its solid twin. It is the same thing, turned around.
- Where the split comes from
- Not a preference. The three solid units are exactly the three faces of the Shell you can see, on
+y,+xand+z. The three opened units are exactly the three you cannot, on-x,-zand-y. A hole is what a face looks like once it has turned away from you, and because a turn brings a hidden face round, you can watch a unit open.
Proton +Y
No vertices, no orientation. The only unit that cannot point, so the only one a turn leaves unchanged.
Electron +X
The only odd-sided unit and the only one with an apex. The only one that can carry direction. Drawn 12% larger to hold equal weight.
Neutron +Z
Tiles with no residue at the grid’s own pitch. The only unit that fills its cell rather than sitting in one, so the only one that reads as area.
Aperture −X
An annulus: the only opening at a constant distance from its boundary. It admits without directing.
Portal −Z
The hole sits at the centroid, below the box centre, so it reads as a passage with a direction through it.
Socket −Y
Containment broken at the middle. The frame survives, the fill does not, so it reads as built to receive.
- A hole is not a negation
- A vacancy in a lattice is a real carrier in physics, not the absence of one. An opened unit is the same idea: not the unit deleted, the unit seen from the other side, keeping the character of the solid it came from. That is what makes the pairing defensible rather than arbitrary.
- One value for every opening
- The same circle at 0.24 of the mark’s radius, punched by subtraction rather than drawn. Wider and a run of opened units reads as a pale patch rather than a different unit. A legibility bound, not a taste one.
The Shell
Idler’s visual model of an environment: a closed, persistent structure in which agents move, act, and are evaluated.
Up +Y
The layer under the top face. Circles ride it.
Right +X
The layer behind the right face. Triangles ride it.
Left +Z
The layer behind the left face. Squares ride it.
Down −Y
The opposite layer, turned away. Sockets ride it.
Back-right −X
The opposite layer. Apertures ride it.
Back-left −Z
The opposite layer. Portals ride it.
One pose
One resting angle. It never tilts.
Shapes persist
A shape moves. It never becomes another.
Walk and return
It turns out, then retraces its path.
Faces retire by angle
A face fades out as it turns away.
One mark, one size
Every mark the same size, in every state.
The silhouette is the Shell
Nothing is stamped on top. The object is the mark.
Applications
Buttons, inputs, tags, tabs, progress and states. Every value here is read from the tokens in 08, and nothing in this section sets a color of its own.
References
Where the system sits, and what it is measured against. Each figure below is drawn from our own six units, because a reference you can only look at is weaker than one you can rebuild. The full argument is on the references page.
Manfred Mohr
The cube as a finite alphabet to exhaust, not an object to draw.
Sol LeWitt
Enumeration over composition. Keep what the system honestly made.
Karl Gerstner
Build the programme, not the poster.
Vera Molnár
Controlled disorder, because a regular field is dead on the page.
The halftone screen
One mark, one size. Density carries the tone.
Otl Aicher
A sign system from one grid and a fixed set of angles.
Photons
Point fields where density shades and motion leaves one origin.
Tokens
Values are read from :root. Reference a state token, never a mineral. Source: docs/color-system.md.