haux.studio

Section 04

Logo

The mark is a griffin, eagle and lion, reduced until only five straight cuts and one notch remain. Five artefacts are approved, one diagonal is permitted, and everything else on this page is a consequence of those two facts.

04 · Logo

Read the mark as the end of a reduction, not as a shape someone drew. Every rule that follows is there to protect the last step of that reduction.

An ancient beast, reduced to geometry

An ancient beast that survives being reduced to geometry.

The griffin is an eagle and a lion in one body: heraldic, old, and specific enough that nobody mistakes it for a generic animal logo. That heritage is the "ancient precision" half of the positioning, and it is doing real work rather than decorating the deck. The "modern speed" half is what happens to the beast on the way down to the final mark.

A heraldic animal is an unusual choice for a studio identity, and it only holds because the animal does not stay a picture. It is subtracted from a squircle, and by the last step it is five cuts and an eye. Nothing in the mark is illustration by the time it ships.

An ancient beast that survives being reduced to geometry.

The one line to remember from this section.

The reduction

This is the central idea of the mark. Anyone changing the logo needs to know which step they are standing on, because the steps are not interchangeable.

Three steps, and the figure becomes the hole

One. The heritage griffin, drawn positive

The beast is drawn rampant, as a positive form on a clear ground, at 1:1. At this stage it is still recognisably an animal: crest, wing, claw, tail. This is the artefact the other two steps are derived from, which is why it survives as a shipping asset rather than being thrown away as a sketch.

Two. The griffin is knocked out of a squircle

The same griffin is subtracted from a solid squircle, so figure and ground swap. The beast is no longer a shape on a field, it is the hole in one. This is the step that makes the mark a system rather than an illustration, because the container is now carrying half the identity.

Three. The hole is reduced to five cuts and an eye

The subtracted form is simplified until only five straight cuts and one triangular notch remain. The notch is the eye, and it is the last piece of the animal left in the mark. Below the size at which that notch resolves, the reduction has failed and the mark stops being a griffin at all.

Step three is the Logo Mark. Steps one and two are separate approved artefacts, not drafts, and the Discard variant below is what step two looks like when it is stopped too early.

The five artefacts

Five approved files, each with one job and one aspect ratio. Anything not on this list is not a Haux mark.

Artefact 01 · Wordmark

haux.studio®, set lowercase throughout, at an aspect of 6.682:1.

The wordmark reads haux.studio® and is lowercase throughout, including the first letter. There is no capitalised variant and no all-caps variant. The full-stop between the two words is part of the mark, not punctuation that can be dropped.

The registered symbol is set small and superscript, top-aligned to the ascender rather than centred on the x-height. Its bounding box counts towards the 6.682:1 aspect, so a wordmark measured without it will be very slightly the wrong shape.

Kerning is metric, never optical

The wordmark is set with the font’s own metric kerning. It is never set to optical kerning and never letter-spaced, in either direction. This was tested directly against the alternatives and metric spacing won, so it is a settled decision rather than a default nobody looked at.

The wordmark ships as outlines. The kerning rule matters because it governs how the mark is rebuilt if it ever has to be reset, and because it stops anyone "improving" the spacing in a layout.

Construction

One angle governs the marks and, by extension, the graphic system built from them.

12° is the only diagonal

Both wing edges are snapped to exactly 12°. It is the only diagonal the system permits.

The angle was verified rather than eyeballed: tan(12°) is 0.212554, and the wing edges measure to that ratio against the construction guides. Anything drawn at 10° or 15° because it looked close enough will be visibly out of family next to a correct edge.

Because 12° is the only permitted diagonal, it is also the angle available to everything downstream of the logo: rules, crops, wipes and pattern. A second angle anywhere in a layout reads as a mistake in the logo, not as variety.

Lockup

The primary lockup is the symbol beside the wordmark. It is specified as proportions so it survives any reproduction size.

One lockup, stated as a ratio

Symbol : gap : wordmark = 1 : 0.387 : 6.682

The symbol box equals the wordmark’s full bounding box, flush top and bottom. That is the rule to state, because it means the lockup can be rebuilt from the wordmark alone without measuring anything.

The gap between them is 0.387 of the symbol width, and the wordmark is 6.682 of it. Set the symbol height to the wordmark height, then space at 0.387 of that height, and the lockup is correct.

The wordmark’s own aspect is 6.682:1, which is why the third number in the lockup ratio matches it exactly. That is a consequence of the flush rule, not a coincidence to be maintained separately.

Clear space

Two rules, both expressed as a fraction of the mark’s own height, so they scale automatically.

Clear space is measured from the mark, not from the page

Wordmark: 0.675 of its bounding-box height

The wordmark keeps clear space of roughly two thirds of its bounding-box height, 0.675, on all four sides. The bounding box includes the registered symbol. Nothing enters that margin: no rule, no image edge, no other logo.

Heritage and Crest: exactly one fifth of the mark height

Both heritage marks and the crest take clear space of exactly one fifth of the mark’s height on all four sides. The tighter figure is deliberate: these marks carry their own visual frame, so they need less air around them than a line of type does.

The source does not state a clear-space rule for the Logo Mark on its own. Until one is set, apply the one-fifth rule, which is the closer analogue.

Open decisions

These are gaps, not omissions from this page. They are written here so nobody fills them in silently.

Four things the source does not decide

Minimum size: proposed, not decided

There is no minimum size rule anywhere in the source. A sensible proposed floor is about 20px for the Logo Mark, on the grounds that the eye notch is 23.8% of the mark width and stops resolving below that. Treat that as a proposal to test in print and on screen, not as a published minimum.

No stacked or vertical lockup exists

Only the horizontal lockup is drawn. There is no stacked or vertical arrangement in the source, so there is no approved way to place the mark above the wordmark. Anyone needing one for a narrow format should have it drawn and approved rather than assembling it in a layout.

No signoff lockup exists

There is no lockup pairing the mark with a strapline, a URL or a partner mark. That means the common end-of-advert and end-of-deck cases are currently unspecified. They need drawing before they are needed, not while.

No misuse board yet

There is no do-not board in the source: no stretched, recoloured, rotated or outlined examples. A misuse board is normally the most-cited page in a logo section, so this is the largest gap of the four. It should be built from real misuses once the mark has been in circulation long enough to produce some.