Shift is the logo, Guru is the icon, SchCotie is the mascot, and the difference
between them is not stylistic. An icon works once, at one size, in one state. A
mascot has to be able to *do* things -- confused, pleased, asleep, seen from
behind -- which is why it costs more and is drawn last. Written down because
this is exactly the kind of decision that gets re-derived badly.
Assets/ becomes docs/branding/, which also fixes two things:
* Filenames had spaces in them, so every reference needed quoting. They are
lowercase and hyphenated now.
* Assets/ held hand-written SVG and generated PNG in one directory, which is
the one rule docs/guides/layout.md states.
The guide records what was previously only in people's heads:
* The constraint everything answers to -- include/logo.h is a 128x128
single-channel coverage mask, so a mark has to survive as a solid shape in
one colour and be recognisable at 24 px. Colour is the last decision, never
the first.
* Guru's purple is load-bearing. PSOGM_BG #4B1D9A is deliberately not the
accent #7C5CFF, and theme.h's rule is that the full-bleed purple belongs
entirely to failure. If Guru appears in accent violet on a sticker, the deep
purple stops meaning "the machine stopped" -- and it is the only colour in
the system that means anything.
* Why shift-mask.svg is a separate file from shift.svg. mklogo.py reads ink as
(255 - luminance) * alpha, so tones survive as coverage and the relationship
inverts: darkest here is brightest on screen. Copying the violet fills would
light the object from below.
* Why a raster is committed beside its SVG. inkscape is not a build
prerequisite, so requiring a vector rasteriser would break the build on most
hosts for a file that changes about once a year.
* That the BSD daemon is copyrighted and SchCotie must be drawn from the
concept rather than from Beastie. A daemon is a Greek daimon and a Unix
background process; neither is ownable. The pitchfork, the sneakers and that
face are.
Format rule: SVG, or PNG at high resolution with no lossy compression, nothing
else. SVG is the source of truth for every mark and a raster is generated from
it, never edited.
include/logo.h regenerates byte-identical from the new path -- only the source
comment differs. The two old wordmark SVGs were deleted outside this session and
are left deleted; their PNGs are kept as superseded-*.png for reference.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01VQ7Qx8E1q1M1bbCq8QLHS2
d73985633b