Logo, October 2026: how the final mark and lockups were made
Logo, October 2026: how the final mark and lockups were made
The working record behind the logo chosen on 13 October 2026 (Sylvie, with Claude). The result lives in system/logo/ and the logo files page; the rules in logo.md. Nothing here is current.
The two working pages (Claude artifacts)
| Page | What it holds | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Seeds Logo Variants | The exploration, in order: three other swallows tried and dropped (an engraving, a photo silhouette, a pencil sketch), rough edges, bigger bird sizes, ways to keep the fingerprints around a bigger bird, the small-size simplification ladder | Record. Local copy: seeds-logo-variants.html (the page only; its images are on the artifact) |
| Seeds Logo Set | The chosen mark in every colourway, the lockup bench with live controls for the "of", saved settings ("Final version") | Superseded by logos.md; marked as moved. Local copy: seeds-logo-set.html |
The earlier comparison of code-drawn woodcut swallows (12 October) is logo-v2-woodcut-swallows.html, moved here from examples/logo/.
What was decided, step by step
- New birds tried and dropped. A public-domain engraving (Rawpixel 6304685), a photo of three swallows and a pencil sketch, each filled solid, mirrored and set in the ring. None beat the original silhouette.
- Keep the original swallow, rising left to right, but break its over-smooth, "commercial" edge. Of five treatments (knife-cut, ink bleed, cut and printed, carved line, grain), cut and printed was chosen.
- Bird 30% bigger. Deleting the prints it touched thinned the ring, so the chosen method pushes those prints out a little and cuts a thin white gap for the rest. The ring stays as dense as before.
- No simplified small versions. A ladder from 40 prints down to a solid ring was tried for small sizes and rejected: the full mark at every size.
- The name: Polyamine capitals with an italic "of" in Fraunces, tuned toward Polyamine (contrast 101, softness 39, weight 350, 115% of cap height, raised 17%), capitals tracked +20, mark 2.7× cap height with a 0.35× gap. Saved as "Final version" on the Seeds Logo Set page.
- Sharp files. The first exports came from the 600 px
logo.pngand looked soft. The final mark is rebuilt from the 1254 px original (ref/sor-logo-bird-prints.png), with the bird traced as a vector. Tracing the fingerprints as vectors was tried and rejected (blotchy ridges).
Files here
build/: the scripts that makesystem/logo/, in order:make_hi.py ../parts/source-logo-600.png ../parts/source-logo-1254.png ../parts/bird-cutprint-2400.png <tmp>: replays the print layout and traces the bird.make_final.py <tmp> ../../../system/logo: the mark in every colourway, and the parts the next steps use.sizes.py ../parts ../../../system/logo/mark/sizes: every size, and the favicon.lockups.py <Polyamine.ttf> <Fraunces-Italic[SOFT,WONK,opsz,wght].ttf> ../parts ../../../system/logo/lockups.glyphs.pymakesparts/wordmark-glyphs.jsonfor the lockup bench. They need Python with numpy, scipy, opencv, Pillow, fonttools, uharfbuzz, potracer and resvg-py; Polyamine installed (unlicensed,design-34t.2); Fraunces from Google Fonts (OFL). Rebuilt from scratch on 13 October 2026, identical to the kept files.
parts/: inputs and pieces: the 600 and 1254 px originals, the rough bird mask at 2400 px, the fingerprint layers, the bird path, the Polyamine outlines.exploration/: the scripts behind the Seeds Logo Variants page (make.pytomake8.py), as run. They read from a scratch folder, so they document the steps more than they rerun.sources/: the bird images tried (Rawpixel 6304685 is public domain; the other two are of unknown origin, not for use) and the wordmark reference screenshot.