SchOS/docs/branding/README.md

# Branding

One mark.

| | | |
|---|---|---|
| **Shift** | *the logo* | An abstract mark. Non-human, non-animal. Signs the system. |

There were three. **Guru**, an icon — a pictogram with a face, denoting one
state — lived on the crash screen and nowhere else. **SchCotie**, a mascot —
a character with a body, poses and expressions — was a brief and was never
drawn. Both are gone for now, and may come back.

The reasoning that retired Guru is worth keeping, because it is the argument
against any second mark. Guru existed to give the crash screen an identity:
`:(` is recognisably Microsoft's, and a crash screen is the single screenshot
most likely to leave the machine, so it is the worst place to be wearing
somebody else's face. That part holds. What does not follow is that the answer
is a *new* mark. Shift already signs the system, it is already what the machine
drew on the splash it started with, and a reader who has seen it twice before
the crash recognises it faster than a face they have never seen.

SchCotie went for a simpler reason: **a mascot has to be able to do things.**
An icon works once, at one size, in one state. A character has to work
confused, pleased, asleep and from behind — which is why it costs more, and why
a brief for one is not worth carrying until somebody is going to draw it.

---

## The one constraint everything answers to

**The kernel draws its mark as a 128×128 single-channel coverage mask.**
`include/gfx/logo.h` holds no colour at all — two pixels per byte, sixteen levels of
ink — and the kernel composites it in whatever `include/gfx/theme.h` says.

So any mark that will end up there has to survive as **a solid shape in one
colour at 128 px, and be recognisable at 24**. That rules out hairlines, thin
rings and anything that depends on a gradient to read. The mark this replaced
failed on all three counts.

Colour is therefore the *last* decision, never the first. Design the silhouette,
then colour it.

---

## Shift — the logo

`shift.svg`

Three slabs, displaced: the layer diagram in
[../architecture/README.md](../architecture/README.md) as a solid object, and
the kernel's name (**SchIFT**) as a shape.

- **Any colour.** This is a fact about the pipeline, not a preference — the
  coverage mask carries none, so the loader draws it in metal and the kernel in
  the theme accent, from the same bytes.
- **With or without a wordmark.** Set "SchOS" beside it in **Roboto Bold**,
  which is already in the tree (`ports/Roboto`), Apache-2.0, and already
  in `NOTICE`.
- **Rendered as an object, drawn as a shape.** The colour `shift.svg` is lit
  the way Niveus lights a key -- one light from the upper left, a gloss across
  each top face, a specular line on the edges that face it, and a soft shadow
  from each slab onto the next. None of that is in the silhouette:
  `shift-mask.svg` is the same geometry with no shading, and it is still what
  `include/gfx/logo.h` is built from, so the kernel's mark is unchanged.
- Non-human and non-animal, permanently. If a character is ever drawn it gets
  its own mark; a logo that starts growing a face has taken that job.

---

## Colour

From `include/gfx/theme.h`, which is the source of truth. Nothing here restates a
value it does not already define.

| | | |
|---|---|---|
| `SCH_BG` | `#0C0E13` | Ground. Near-black with a blue cast, because pure black reads as "switched off". |
| `SCH_FG` | `#E6E8EC` | Primary text |
| `SCH_DIM` | `#707784` | Secondary |
| `SCH_ACCENT` | `#7C5CFF` | The one accent. Shift, and anything calm. |
| `PSOGM_BG` | `#4B1D9A` | **Failure only.** The crash screen's ground and nothing else's. |

`PSOGM_BG` is deliberately **not** the accent. `theme.h` states the rule it
enforces:

> normal states are calm and dark; only failure is loud. PSOGM keeps the
> full-bleed purple entirely to itself, which is what makes it mean something.

If that purple ever appears on a splash, a sticker or a README header, it stops
meaning *the machine stopped* — and it is the only colour in the system that
means anything at all.

## File formats

**SVG, or PNG at high resolution with no lossy compression.** Nothing else.

No JPEG anywhere — a mark is flat colour with hard edges, which is the exact
case JPEG is worst at, and the ringing it leaves around an edge is permanent.
No screenshots of marks. No re-exports of re-exports: go back to the SVG.

**SVG is the source of truth for every mark.** A raster is something generated
from it, never edited.

## The mark as characters

`Ascii/ascii_{50,68,100,150}.txt` — Shift rendered in text at four widths, named
for the column count they fit in.

`make` installs the 50-column one as `/usr/share/schos/logo.txt`, because 50 is
what leaves room for an info block beside it on an 80-column console:

```sh
fastfetch --file-raw /usr/share/schos/logo.txt
```

Installed from here rather than copied into `sysroot/` by hand, so there is one
source and the build keeps them in step.

These are a *rendering* of the mark, not a second mark. If Shift changes they
are regenerated from it; they are not edited to taste, or the two drift and the
text one wins by being the one people see in a terminal.

## What is in here, and why a raster is committed

```
shift.svg               the logo, in colour
shift-mask.svg          the same geometry in greys -- see below
shift-mask.png          rasterised from it, committed on purpose
uberblock.svg           SchFS
superseded-*.png        the old wordmark, kept for reference only
```

The pipeline is three stages:

```
shift-mask.svg  --(inkscape)-->  shift-mask.png  --(make logo)-->  include/gfx/logo.h
```

**Both intermediates are committed, and that is deliberate.** `inkscape` is not
a build prerequisite — see [../guides/building.md](../guides/building.md) — so a
build that required a vector rasteriser would stop working on most hosts for the
sake of a file that changes about once a year. The PNG is regenerated by hand
when the SVG changes, and `make logo` turns it into the header.

### Why the mask is a separate file from the logo

`tools/python/mklogo.py` reads ink as `(255 - luminance) * alpha`, so **tones
survive as coverage** rather than being flattened — and the relationship
inverts: *darkest here is brightest on screen*. Copying the violet fills from
`shift.svg` would light the object from below.

So `shift-mask.svg` is the same geometry in greys chosen for how the mask reads.
Two files sharing one geometry is a drift hazard; the `<desc>` in both says so.
If either is edited, edit both.

---

## Where each mark is actually drawn

| | |
|---|---|
| Loader splash | Shift, from `include/gfx/logo.h`, shaded per row by `metal()` in `boot/common/ui.c` — silver, not accent. |
| Kernel console / early boot | Shift, same mask, composited flat in a theme colour by `gfx_draw_logo`. |
| A display with no compositor | Shift again, drawn by `vgpud` on `SCH_BG`. It replaced a test card — colour bands, gradients, a checkerboard and the driver's pid in binary — which was scaffolding for [../plan/hybrid.md](../plan/hybrid.md)'s H2 and H3 and outlived them. The mark answers the same question a black screen cannot, *something is driving this device*, and answers it as the system rather than as a test rig. |
| PSOGM | Shift, the same mask again, by `gfx_draw_logo()` from `kernel/core/panic.c`. At its native 128 px — there is no resampler in the crash path, and the mark was only ever drawn at one size there anyway. |
| Serial crash report | `:(`, as text. The mark cannot be drawn in ASCII, and a mood marker in a log is not a mark. |
| SchFS | **Nowhere yet.** `uberblock.svg` has no consumer; it is waiting for `projects/schfs-linux/` to have a README worth heading. |

One trap, since it has already been stepped in: `boot/common/ui.c` includes
`logo.h`, `theme.h` and `font.h`, and the Makefile rule for the loader did not
list them. A new logo therefore did not rebuild the loader — `make` reported
nothing to do and the splash kept drawing a mask compiled months earlier. The
kernel half never showed the problem because those objects are built with
`-MD -MP` and track their own headers. **Changing anything in here means the
loader must actually relink**, and that needs `clang` and `lld-link`.

## What this does not cover

- **No trademark position.** These are marks the project uses, not marks anyone
  has registered or defended.
- **No usage rules for third parties** — nothing says what someone else may do
  with them. Worth writing before anything is published.
- **There is no icon and no mascot.** Both were removed rather than left
  half-specified. If either comes back it starts from the argument at the top
  of this file, not from what used to be here.
- **No wordmark lockup is specified.** "Roboto Bold beside it" is not a spacing
  rule, a size ratio or a clear-space margin, and it will want to be.