# 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.

*Updated 2026-08-14. Source: https://brand.haux.studio/logo*

## An ancient beast, reduced to geometry

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 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.

## Three steps, and the figure becomes the hole

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.

### 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.

#### 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.*

#### Logo Mark

The squircle with a single boolean subtraction. The end of the reduction, and the mark used almost everywhere.

##### Anatomy

One squircle, one boolean subtraction, four surviving features. The subtraction leaves a band across the top, a vertical stroke on the right-hand edge, a faceted wedge, and one inverted triangular notch whose apex is rounded.

That notch is the griffin’s eye. It is the only feature in the mark that is representational, and it is the reason the whole thing still reads as a creature rather than as an app icon.

##### The squircle is a path, not a border-radius

The corner radius is 30.9% of the side, drawn with continuous smooth corners. CSS border-radius produces a circular arc, which meets the straight edge with a visible change of curvature at that radius. The mark must therefore ship as a path in SVG, and a div with a large border-radius is not an acceptable substitute anywhere.

##### The small cut is not a scaled copy

A separately drawn, optically tuned version of the mark exists for use below roughly 165px. It is not a uniform scale of the large cut: the cuts have been re-weighted so the mark holds together at small sizes. Using the large cut small, or the small cut large, is a visible error rather than a subtlety.

*The 165px figure is the crossover point recorded in the source. It is a threshold for choosing between two files, and it is not a minimum size rule. See the open decisions below.*

#### Heritage A and B

The rampant griffin as a positive form, 1:1, in two heads.

Both heritage marks are the rampant griffin at 1:1. They are the top of the reduction, so they carry the most detail of anything in the system and are the least suited to small sizes. Use them where the identity has room to be ceremonial rather than functional.

A and B differ in exactly one place: the head. Everything below the neck is identical between the two, so treating them as separate drawings will introduce differences that are not meant to be there.

##### Heritage Logo A

Flat crown, and the wide triangular eye notch. That notch is the feature that survives all the way down into the Logo Mark, which makes A the version that is continuous with the rest of the system.

##### Heritage Logo B

Raised crest, and a slit eye. B is the more ornamental of the two and does not share its eye with the Logo Mark, so it reads as a related mark rather than as the same beast at a different resolution.

*The source approves both without stating which is preferred. Where the heritage mark sits near the Logo Mark, A is the consistent choice because the eye matches.*

#### Crest Mark

The heritage griffin inside a hollow cartouche, at 0.885:1.

The crest places the heritage griffin inside a hollow cartouche at an aspect of 0.885:1, so it stands very slightly taller than it is wide. The cartouche is an outline, not a filled plate, and the griffin sits inside the void rather than on top of a shape.

Each of the cartouche’s four edge midpoints pinches inward with a concave scallop. Those four pinches are the whole character of the frame, and flattening them turns the crest into a rounded rectangle with an animal in it.

*The crest is the most detailed artefact in the system. Treat it as a ceremonial mark: certificates, stamps, embossing, the back of a card.*

#### Discard

One variant exists in the source and is marked Discard. It must not ship.

The discarded variant is the full griffin knocked out of a squircle: step two of the reduction, kept as a finished mark. It is marked Discard in the source and is not an approved artefact.

It is worth naming rather than deleting quietly, because it is the most obvious thing a designer will reinvent. The reason it fails is that it is neither artefact: too detailed to work at Logo Mark sizes, and too constrained by the container to work as heritage.

## 12° is the only diagonal

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

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.

## One lockup, stated as a ratio

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

### 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 is measured from the mark, not from the page

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

### 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.*

## Four things the source does not decide

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

### 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.

*Nothing on this list should be treated as settled. Each one needs a decision recorded in the source before it becomes a rule here.*