Logo

A black swallow rising through a radiating circle of red fingerprints: many hands around a bird in flight. Chosen 13 October 2026. Every file, shown on its ground with links: logos.html. Part of the SoR design system. Earlier notes: logo-notes.md.

Terms

• Mark (logomark, the stamp): the swallow in fingerprints.
• Wordmark (logotype): "Seeds of Renaissance" lettered in Polyamine, with "of" as a lowercase italic in Fraunces. Polyamine has only capitals and no italic, so a Polyamine "of" (slanted or small) looks wrong (decided 2026-10-08 on the Wisdom cover). Fraunces rather than Restora: its italic "of" looks better in the wordmark (Rufus, 2026-10-08). Fraunces is otherwise only a fallback; this one word is the exception to "four faces only". For display sizes only.
• Lockup: mark and wordmark fixed together, as in the site header.
• Below display size, the name is not the wordmark: it is set as text in the system's small face, Apfel Grotezk (diagrams.md).

The logo (chosen 13 October 2026)

• The mark: the original swallow, rising left to right, kept but given a cut-and-printed edge so it no longer looks like a stock silhouette; 30% bigger in the ring than before. The fingerprints it would touch are pushed out a little, with a thin white gap around the bird, so the ring stays full.
• The full mark at every size. No simplified small version: the same mark from 16 px up (smaller sizes are drawn for their size, not shrunk).
• The wordmark: Polyamine capitals tracked +20 (font units); "of" in Fraunces italic at weight 350, optical size 101, softness 39, 115% of the cap height, raised 17% of the cap height, with 0.8 of a word space on each side. The capitals and "of" are outlines in the files, so no fonts are needed to use them.
• The horizontal lockup is the main logo: the mark at 2.7× the cap height, 0.35× cap height from the name. Two-line and stacked lockups are for spaces it doesn't fit.

How it was arrived at (birds tried, edges, sizes, the "of"), with the working pages: archive/logo-2026-10/.

Files

All in system/logo/; see them in logos.html.

SVGs scale freely; the fingerprints inside them are sharp up to about 1130 px, enough for screens and A4 print. Larger print needs the original fingerprint artwork.

Colourways

These replace the one-colour filter recipe (2026-10-08) and settle the dark-ground question: on night, use colour-dark or white, no disc needed.

Using it

• Use the files as they are. Don't recolour, stretch, rotate or redraw them, or add effects. Choose the colourway for the ground from the table above.
• Clear space (proposed): at least one cap height of the wordmark on every side, and the same between the logo and the edge of the page or frame.
• Minimum size (proposed): below about 32 px of mark height, the name can't be read; use the mark alone.
• The white disc (.logo-disc) or a white tile is still fine where the mark sits on a busy photograph.
• In the site header it sits beside the wordmark, set in Polyamine with "of" in Fraunces italic (.wordmark em in components.css):

<a class="wordmark" href="/"><img src="system/img/logo.png" alt=""><span>Seeds <em>of</em> Renaissance</span></a>

• In the footer it sits above the name.
• Earlier one-colour recipe, for the record: an SVG feColorMatrix on logo.png, rows 0 0 0 0 R / 0 0 0 0 G / 0 0 0 0 B / -0.7 -0.7 -0.7 0 2, with color-interpolation-filters="sRGB". Example: the Wisdom cover, life-itself/2rbook wisdom/cover/cover.html. Prefer the black, white and red files now.

Which mark where

Seeds is the brand. Life Itself, its steward and the authors' home, is credited in text. At most one logo on any surface. Reasoning: decisions.md.

Open

1. A deeper, ink-like red instead of the clean screen red. Decided 2026-10-12: keep the logo red #e5201c (colour.md).
2. A hand-drawn or printmade swallow instead of the stock silhouette. Decided 2026-10-13: keep the original swallow with a cut-and-printed edge (record: archive/logo-2026-10/; the earlier woodcut comparison: archive/logo-2026-10/logo-v2-woodcut-swallows.html).
3. A small version for favicons and avatars. Decided 2026-10-13: the full mark at every size, drawn for each size.
4. A full set and dark grounds. Done 2026-10-13: five colourways and five lockups (logos.html).
5. Polyamine licence before public use of the wordmark (beads design-34t.2).
6. Roll out beyond the design system: the seal in system/graphics.svg, YouTube avatar and watermark, social avatars, the Canva kit and Instagram exports (re-export them; they hold the old mark), and the website's own copy. The site header's live wordmark still uses Fraunces at 300; match it to the settings above or use the lockup file.
7. Larger than A4: the original fingerprint scan or artwork, for posters and banners.