Graphics Standards Manual, 2026 Edition

The Drew Ink Mark

The mark is a tile carrying one drawn stroke and one point. The stroke is the line the foundry exists to make; the point is where it stops. Nothing else is in it, and nothing else may be added to it.

It is reproduced from the artwork in Section 2. It must not be re-drawn. A mark redrawn by eye is a second mark, and two marks are no mark.

One colour: not issued this edition. The mark's contrast is carried between its own inks rather than against paper, so reduced to a single colour it closes to a solid tile. Do not reproduce the mark in one colour. Where a single-colour reproduction is required — stamping, embroidery, engraving — use the wordmark set in Section 2 until a one-colour mark is issued.

1 · the mark

2 · the mark reduced to one colour. This reproduction is not permitted.

1.1

The Mark: Incorrect Uses

The mark is designed as a solid tile carrying one stroke, shown square and upright. It must not be altered. Its effectiveness depends on consistently correct usage as set out in this manual.

1 · It must never be stretched, or set to any proportion but square.
2 · It must never be rotated off its horizontal base.
3 · Its stroke must never be recoloured away from the specified figure.
4 · It must never be outlined.

5 · It must never be placed inside another shape.
6 · It must never carry a shadow, a glow or a bevel.
7 · Its corner radius must never be changed.
8 · It must never be shown below 16px, where its point closes up.

1 · stretched

2 · rotated

3 · recoloured

4 · outlined

5 · boxed

6 · shadowed

7 · radius changed

8 · below the floor

1.2

Clear Space and Minimum Size

Nothing sits inside the keep-out. Not type, not a rule, not another mark, not the edge of the sheet. The measure is R, the mark's own corner radius, so it holds at any size without being restated.

Clear space: 2R on every side. At the mark's standard 32-unit tile that is 12 units, which is three eighths of the mark itself.

Minimum size: 16px, and 8mm in print. Below it the point closes into the stroke and the mark reads as a smudge. There is no exception for a footer.

The keep-out, drawn. 2R on every side.

96, 48, 24, 16 — and, ruled out, 11.

1.3

The Mark and the Name

The mark alone is the preferred form. Use it wherever the reader already knows where they are: an application, a favicon, a stamp, a second appearance on a page whose first appearance carried the name.

The mark with the name is for first contact — a cover, a signature, a surface a stranger arrives on. The name sits to the right of the mark, optically centred on it, at a cap height equal to half the mark, with 1R between them.

The name is never set inside the mark, never below it, and never in a second weight. A mark that has to carry its own name everywhere has not been used enough yet; the object is to need it less each year.

Preferred · the mark alone

Drew Ink

First contact · mark and name

1.4

Reproduction Art

The artwork below is the mark. Reproduce from the file. It must not be traced, redrawn, or rebuilt from the images printed in this manual, which are set at the sizes these pages need and not at the sizes you will use.

Files are SVG and scale without loss. Icon artwork carries no fixed colour: it takes the colour of the text around it, so the ground decides.

The Drew Ink mark · SVG
von, Caelivon Studios · SVG
Every icon, individually · SVG, one file per mark
The catalogue · JSON, for anyone building against it

2.1

Proportion: the Antimatter of the Golden Ratio

This system is built on whole ratios, and the choice was calculated rather than preferred. φ = 1.6180339887… is the least approximable number that exists: c(φ) = 1/√5 = 0.44721, the Hurwitz ceiling, which nothing in existence exceeds. That, and not beauty, is its property.

Its opposite is c = 0, and c = 0 is not a rarer irrational. It is every whole ratio there has ever been. Cut the square off a golden rectangle and it never closes; off a double square and it closes in one step. Fibonacci needs 17 terms to reach φ to six places. Doubling is exactly 2 at the first.

The law. One module, 8. Whole multiples only. Three ratios and no others — 1:1, 4:3, 3:2 — and the 2:1 they multiply to exactly. You can fold a sheet in half with your hands. There is no fold that gives you φ.

number	c(x)	square-cut
φ golden	0.44721 = 1/√5	never closes
1+√2 silver	0.35355	never closes
π	0.21453	never closes
2 the double square	0	one step

3.1

The Ladder

Every length on every surface is a rung. The octave divides exactly into a fifth and a fourth with nothing left over — 3/2 × 4/3 = 2 — so the rungs alternate and land on a doubling every second step, in whole numbers, forever.

The golden rectangle cannot be divided into whole ratios at all. It only ever divides into itself, which is why a system built on it can be admired and cannot be executed.

fifth

fourth

fifth

fourth

fifth

fourth

fifth

fourth

128

fifth

192

fourth

256

3.2

If It Is Ever a Flag

Flat colour laid in courses is a slot in a public lexicon, and the reader fills it from the one they already have: flags, party colours, kit, insignia, placards. An element designed alone is read in combination with whatever sits beside it, and the combination carries a meaning nobody authored.

The answer is not to avoid the lexicon, which cannot be done: there are some two hundred national flags and any three stacked courses land on one of them. The answer is to know which one you would choose.

It would be the Dannebrog, and nothing on these surfaces is one. A cross divides the plane on two axes and so can never be read as courses. Its proportions were set by the regulation of 11 June 1748 and are still in force: 3:1:3 vertically, 3:1:4.5 horizontally — whole numbers, and off-centre toward the hoist by specification. Section 3.1's law, fixed in a flag 278 years earlier.

313 314.5

The oldest continuously used national flag in the world, and it has never officially defined its own red: Dansk Standard fixed it as Pantone 186 C in 2005, three hundred and eighty years after 1625. The geometry is what survived. The colour never did.

3.3

The Construction Grid

Every icon is built here and nowhere else, which is what makes a pack a pack rather than marks that share a folder. Four numbers decide everything after them, and all four are whole.

Box 24 — the space the geometry is authored in, so a 16px use and a 96px use are one drawing at two scales.
Padding 2 — the keyline. Nothing crosses it.
Stroke 2 — one weight, held. A set with three weights in it is a set nobody drew.
Snap 1 — centrelines on integers, so a 2-wide stroke has its edges on integers too.

After NASA, whose grid drawing notes that three units equal the vertical stroke width: the module is the mark's own stroke, counted. Here the box is 12 strokes across and the live area is 10.

circle · 20

square · 18

rectV · 16 × 20

rectH · 20 × 16

Optical correction. A circle of diameter 20 reads smaller than a square of side 20, so the circle keeps its 20 and the square is pulled in to 18. The grid is a machine; the eye is not.

4.1

Colour

Colour is structure, never a stripe. The test is Rand's: delete the colour and see whether the idea survives. If nothing is lost, the colour was never doing anything.

The ground is #fbfbf9, a neutral near-white, never cream. Ink is #111111. There is one grey, #4e4e4e, and no second one.

#d94420 is the figure colour. It marks, it rules, it counts. It never carries text.

#fbfbf9
the ground

#111111
the ink

#4e4e4e
the only grey

#d94420
the figure, never text

#0b3d91
Typefaces

#8e3013
Icons

#12482c
Logos

5.1

Typefaces

A face needs a lowercase, fitted spacing, kerning and a specimen before the word applies. That was written here when the house had cut 26 capitals for the Monogram pack and nothing else, and it is kept because the test is the point.

21 families meet it in 2026. Two more are drawn and stand refused by their own gate, which is the same standard doing its work from the other side: a family is listed here when it passes, and not before.

Surfaces carrying this identity are set in Drew Grotesk, and the ramp in Section 3 governs every size on them.

Section 6 carries one page this edition, and it is this one.

6.1

Icon Pack: Core

The marks every icon library agrees you cannot ship without.

97 marks on the 24-unit box of Section 4. 2px stroke, round caps.

Each mark is issued individually as SVG and the whole pack is shown at working size on the icons page.

First 48 of 97. Shown at the size the plate shows them.

7.1

Icon Pack: Atelier

The set a drawing tool needs before it can draw anything.

66 marks on the 24-unit box of Section 4. 2px stroke, round caps.

Each mark is issued individually as SVG and the whole pack is shown at working size on the icons page.

First 48 of 66. Shown at the size the plate shows them.

7.2

Icon Pack: Type

The parts of a letter, and the ways type is set.

48 marks on the 24-unit box of Section 4. 2px stroke, round caps.

Each mark is issued individually as SVG and the whole pack is shown at working size on the icons page.

Shown at the size the plate shows them.

7.3

Logos: What Counts As One

An icon must be GENERIC to be legible instantly. A logo must be SPECIFIC to be ownable. Aiming at instant legibility produces an icon every single time, and that is how 2026 produced 104 monograms and 18 pictograms that were not logos and were withdrawn.

A logo carries a subject: a company, and a form that came out of what that company does. No measurement can see a subject, so a mark is not begun here until the trade and the idea behind it are written down, and it is not issued if they are missing.

In effect this edition: the library holds 29 marks: 2 the house's own, and 27 drawn to a trade and an idea written down before the mark was begun. Each is drawn to this manual rather than to a brief.

LOOM · Wordmark

KILN · Wordmark

FATHOM · Wordmark

RUSH · Wordmark

TIDE · Wordmark

FLINT · Wordmark

QUARRY · Wordmark

EMBER · Wordmark

GAUGE · Wordmark

ANVIL · Wordmark

MORTISE · Wordmark

HASP · Wordmark

SPAN · Wordmark

WEIR · Wordmark

LOOM · Symbol

KILN · Symbol

FATHOM · Symbol

RUSH · Symbol

TIDE · Symbol

FLINT · Symbol

QUARRY · Symbol

EMBER · Symbol

MERIDIAN · Symbol

CANTILEVER · Symbol

KEEL · Symbol

SLUICE · Symbol

HUSK · Symbol

Drew Ink · Monogram

von · Wordmark

8.1

Compliance

No mark leaves this foundry on an opinion. Each one is measured, on the pixels a screen actually renders, against the standards below. They are printed here so that anyone reproducing the work can hold it to the same account.

Keyline — no artwork crosses the 2-unit padding of Section 4.
Weight — ink within band of the set's own median, so no mark breaks the row it sits in.
Sixteen — the mark must still read at 16px, which is the smallest size any of this work is issued for.

Blur — a mark must stay recognisable once its detail is gone. Detail is what survives only at the size it was drawn.
One colour — a band, not a floor. Remove the colour: if nothing is lost, the colour was never doing work. But a mark that needs its colours in order to exist does not exist, and is not issued.

Every standard above is a measurement, and no measurement can see a subject. A mark can satisfy all of them and still be about nothing, which is why Section 8 comes first in practice and this section comes last.

9.1

The Sign on Our Own Sites

A site the company owns carries the sign at its foot: the mark at its 16px minimum and the words Powered by Drew Ink, linking here. It says who drew the typefaces, the icons and the design language the site is built in, and it is the only sign the foundry issues.

Our own sites only. Work drawn for someone else does not carry it, however much of that work is ours. A sign on another party's site is a statement about them, and they did not make it. A typeface under licence is a licence, not a sign; the licence is in Section 8's terms and it grants no mark.

Once a page, at the foot, in the page's own ink at the body size or smaller. Never beside a price, a payment or a term of sale: a sign next to money reads as a party to the transaction, and the foundry is not one. The operating entity is still named in full on those pages, and the sign never stands in for it. A site also carries the sign of whoever runs it, which is a different arm making a different claim; this section governs only the foundry's.

1 · the sign, at the foot of a site the company owns

Incorrect: on a site made for a client; on a page of ours where the only Drew Ink work is a licensed face; more than once on one page; set larger than the body; redrawn, recoloured, animated, or given a second line of copy.

2 · uses not permitted

10.1

Graphics Standards Manual, 2026 Edition. Set in Drew Grotesk. Every dimension, ratio and colour value on these pages is taken directly from the system that produces the work, so this manual and the work cannot disagree. Issued by the year; an edition, once closed, is not revised.