Watching is a cold word for what the product does, so nothing in the drawing is cold. Five decisions carry that, and section 01 takes them one at a time.
Put together, the mark should feel like attention from someone who knows your work, rather than a system reading your data. That difference is small in a sentence and large in a drawing, and every measurement below follows from it.
Odin gave an eye at Mimir’s well and got knowledge for it. The mark is that trade, drawn as an eye.
The outer shape is the letter O. The rest of this section is about what kind.
The second letter is in there too. Not the stem — the tittle, the dot over the i.
It is drawn as a squircle, like everything else here. A hard dot in a soft O looks like a part dropped into a frame.
An O around a dot is an eye whether you meant it or not. Here it was meant.
The risk is that the eye is a worn-out symbol, and when it does turn up it is usually one of two shapes. The almond gives it away: pointed at both ends, and it only exists because someone drew it there. This one is just the letters.
People pick the curved one. Shown pairs of objects that differ only in contour, they do it reliably, and angular contours light up the amygdala — the threat end of the brain. Whether that is liking curves or disliking corners is still argued over. The preference holds either way.
Odin watches your systems all day. It should not look like it is watching you, and a sharp-cornered mark would say that before anyone read a word.
So not a square. Not a circle either: open any serif and the O is flatter top and bottom than a compass would draw, heavier at the sides. A plain circle is friendly and nothing else — a dot, a status light. Drawn in the same box, the square has corners and the circle has none; the mark sits between them.
A counter is not a hole punched through a shape. It is the same decision made twice, and it shows when the two disagree. The almond is pointed at both ends inside a shape that has no points anywhere; the circle has no argument with the outside, but no agreement with it either.
The one it uses is the same kind of curve as the outside — flat through the top and bottom, turning at the shoulders. Not the outer shape scaled down: it is wider than it is tall, where the outer is barely wider than it is high. Built the same way, sized for where it sits.
The O at that contour, the dot in its counter, and the eye that comes of the two.
In ink, because it has to work as a shape first. A good colour will not rescue one that does not.
Sienna is earth from Tuscany, dug and burnt. One of the oldest colours we have, and it carries that.
Warm colours also come forward, so the mark stays close instead of backing off the page. A shape chosen to look friendly should not then retreat. Beside it is the same mark at the same lightness with the hue turned 180 degrees, to #0087bf — nothing but the hue differs, and the cool one sits back.
The technical name is a squircle. What matters is how far along it sits. A Bézier circle puts its control handles at 0.5523 of the radius. A square is at 1.0. This contour is at 0.660.
Measured at 45 degrees, where the gap between a circle and a square is widest, a circle reaches 136 units from the centre and a square reaches 192. The mark reaches 144. Close to the circle, a long way from the square. That gap is what keeps it from reading as a rounded box with something in it.
The mark and the name together. This is the one to reach for. What follows is the other four arrangements and when each of them is the right one instead.
The mark can stand alone. With type, the type is Sentient on one line, to the right of the mark or under it, in neutral-1200. There is no sixth arrangement.
Shown at equal cap height rather than equal box height, so the wordmarks are the same size and the five are actually comparable.
The spacing module is the wordmark's lowercase o, which is how brand systems set this — Memphis measures the gap between mark and wordmark by the o, Android sets clear space to it, GOV.UK uses the dot for the gap and the G for the margins. The module comes from the type, so it scales with the type rather than with the mark.
Beside the mark that is one o, 129 units. Under it, one and a half, 196. More rather than less: beside the mark the type meets a vertical edge, and under it the type meets the widest part of a round shape, so the same measure closes up.
| What | Value | Why |
|---|---|---|
| type | Sentient Medium | Never another face, and never another weight. |
| size | 250 / 276 of the mark | Cap height at 0.62 of the mark. The mark has to be the larger thing, or the lockup reads as type with a bullet in front of it. |
| mark, stacked | ×2.2 / ×1.6 | Larger above a centred line, and larger again over one short word. |
| module | the lowercase o | 0.518em wide, 0.523em tall. Every gap is measured in it. |
| gap, beside | 1 o · 129 | The standard measure for a horizontal lockup. |
| gap, under | 1.5 o · 196 | Type under a round shape has the whole curve to clear. |
| tracking | -0.028em | Sentient is closely fitted; at logo size it wants a little less again. |
| clear space | the mark's height | On every side of the whole lockup. |
| wordmark | neutral-1200 | Always. The mark can take a colour; the type never does. |
The height of the mark on every side, which is the most common rule and the safest: it scales with the whole lockup rather than with one part of it. It is the one measurement here that comes off the drawing rather than the type, because the logo has to hold its own on someone else's page.
One thing changes as the logo gets smaller: the arrangements drop away, one by one, until only the mark is left. The weight does not change, and the cut of the mark does.
The wordmark is Sentient Medium at every size. An earlier rule dropped it to Regular below 40px, on the reasoning that Medium reads black when the counters start closing. Measured, that is not what happens: at a 21px mark the Medium stem is 2.76 pixels, which is a healthy stem, and Regular is 2.11.
Against the mark’s own 28-unit ring the Medium wordmark measures 1.29 at every size; Regular measures 0.99. So the small lockups came out lighter than the large ones. The rule was written to solve the opposite problem.
A lockup is not only a weight. As the mark gets smaller the wordmark beside it gets shorter, and then goes altogether.
Every lockup at every size is Sentient Medium. The whole weight rule, so it is stated once here rather than repeated down the table.
| Size | Use | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 40px and up | all five | Nothing is under pressure at this size. Large mark cut. |
| 24 to 40px | all five | The small mark cut takes over. The stacked lockups start to want room; check the clear space. |
| under 24px | the mark, or Odin beside it | The full wordmark is 8.4 mark-widths long. At 21px that is a line, not a name. |
| under 16px | the mark alone | Below this the eye closes up and even the small cut stops holding. |
Two corrections, applied independently. The outer contour is identical in all four; what changes is the eye, because small sizes and reversed use each distort it in ways the drawing cannot survive.
Each is shown at the sizes it is for, not at matching sizes. The two cuts never appear together in use, and side by side at one size they read as two different marks rather than one mark drawn twice.
Both corrections are the same problem: the lid's flat sides are the first thing to go, whether the renderer cannot draw them at 16px or the light eats them on a dark ground. Both raise the control ratio, and combined they raise it twice.
Drawn in ink rather than in sienna. These four are about a shape, and sienna on a tint is 4.3:1 where ink on cream is 15.5 — at 16px that is the difference between seeing the correction and taking it on trust. Colour is the section below.
| Condition | What changes | Why |
|---|---|---|
| under 40px | eye k 0.660 → 0.690 | At 21px the eye is 9.7px tall and its corner turn spans 1.7px. There is no room to draw a flat, so the renderer draws a curve and the eye goes oval. A higher control ratio holds the straight section: 3.1px becomes 3.7px. |
| reversed | ring −2 · pupil −1 · k 0.660 → 0.700 | Light shapes spread on a dark ground. Here it happens three ways: the ring swells inward, the pupil swells outward, and the light creeping into the eye's corners rounds them off, so the lid reads as an oval. Two units off the ring and a higher control ratio hold all three. Any more on the ring and it reads as thinner rather than the same. |
Twenty-five variants from one drawing. The outer contour is identical in every one — the same O, the same ring, the same size. What changes is inside it, and three numbers make all of them: how far the lid slides, how far it narrows, and where the pupil sits.
These are variants, not states of a component. Nothing here replaces the primary mark; they exist for the places a product can afford a little life, and each one is a file.
| Level | Lid | Ring above | In front · behind |
|---|---|---|---|
| front-on | 212 × 128 | 61 | 28 · 28 |
| turned | 174 × 136 | 53 | 21 · 73 |
| profile | 98 × 146 | 39 | 23 · 147 |
Not a glance. The mark itself, looking at you — everything below is a departure from it.
The lid holds still and the pupil moves inside it, clipped by the lid so it can pass the edge and tuck underneath.
The lid slides 26 units forward, rises 7 and narrows to 82 per cent, keeping its height. A turned face looking straight ahead is looking where it is turned, so the pupil sits at the far side rather than the middle.
A different silhouette, not a further turn: the eye is a narrow almond at 46 per cent of its width, sitting 62 forward and 15 up, with a thin ring in front of it and a thick one behind.
Every lid and every pupil is four curves and a close, written by one function, so any two of them interpolate. A mark that follows a cursor is those files and a transition between them, nothing more.
Move the pointer anywhere on this page. The mark in the bar above is doing it too, and has been since you arrived.
The pupil does the looking and the head only leans, and only once the eye has run out of room. A cursor is something to watch, not somewhere to walk — the turn is capped at a fifth of the way, and the profiles are not reachable at all.
Nothing here is a new drawing. The three levels are four numbers each, and a level of 0.3 is those four blended, so every position the mark passes through is a point on the same line the twenty-five variants sit on. The lid and the pupil are rebuilt from those numbers every frame rather than transitioned between, which is the only way the lid can change shape as smoothly as the pupil moves.
| What | Value | Why |
|---|---|---|
| pupil | 1.4× the radius | It does the looking, and saturates early. |
| head, starts | 1.6× | Not until the eye has run out of room. |
| head, stops | level 0.44 of 2.00 | A lean. Never a turn, never a profile. |
| easing | 16% a frame | About a fifth of a second to arrive. |
| at rest | no frames | The loop stops when it gets there. |
The wordmark is neutral-1200 on any light ground. The mark takes a colour; on the brand fill or a dark
ground both go to the lightest neutral, because at that point the type has nothing darker to be.
The two dark grounds use the reversed cut: two units off the ring and one off the pupil, which is enough to cancel the spread and little enough that it is plainly the same drawing.
Odin, or the mark on its own.Odin or the mark alone.Nothing delivered from here is live type. Every file in Resources is outlined, so a lockup landing in someone else's deck, site or print job carries its own drawing and needs no font at all. The lockups on this page are the exception, because the page is regenerated from these measurements on every build.