identity.
two marks, and one of them almost always wins. usva. is four letters and a period, and the period is the load-bearing part: it is accent-alt made visible, the paired second voice. railo is what appears when those four letters have nowhere to go.
which mark, when
railo is a stand-in, not a companion. the two are not set side by side in usva's own chrome, where the name is already on the page. in marketing they go together: on a surface that has never met us, the name is the thing nobody remembers and the mark is what carries it back.
- the nav, from md up
- headers, footers, signatures
- anywhere there is a line to sit on
- the nav, below md
- a browser tab, an app icon, an avatar
- anything square, or under 24px
- marketing, launch art, slides
- merch, stickers, booths
- anywhere the name is still new
one wordmark, three registers
the same four letters, rendered once per theme scope. watch accent-alt change meaning under the period without the letters moving at all.
wordmark clearspace
keep room equal to the height of the u on every side. the mist needs air; nothing crowds the mark.
four ways to get the wordmark wrong
hover each one. the mark refuses the change the same way the rest of the system does.
railo, and how it is made
two fields arrive from opposite sides. where they meet, the overlap is taken out of both, and the lens left in the gap is the mark. nothing is drawn: railo is what the two fields do not share.
two cuts
one construction, drawn twice. the small cut is not the large one scaled down: the fields move apart until the crescents and the gap carry the same weight, because at 16px whichever is thinner disappears first.
thin crescents around a wide lens. the gap does most of the talking.
- r
- 31
- centres
- 38 / 64
- crescent
- 26
- lens
- 36
the fields move out until crescent and lens weigh the same, so neither one thins away first.
- r
- 34
- centres
- 33 / 67
- crescent
- 34
- lens
- 34
16 is the floor. below it the lens closes and the mark becomes a smudge, so there is nothing to use.
railo clearspace
the mark sets its own margin. the left field is accent, the right is accent-alt, in that order, and the gap between them takes whatever is behind it.
the room around the mark is one lens wide, the same gap the mark leaves in itself. nothing sits closer.
five ways to get railo wrong
most of these look like small adjustments. each one takes out the subtraction, which is the only thing holding the mark together.