Designing the mark

The logo is the one part of a brand you see at every size, from a sixteen-pixel browser tab to a banner. We wanted ours to feel inevitable rather than drawn. Here is what it means, how it is built, and the small decisions that only show up at small sizes.

The Aisterpiece Studios mark: four gold blades around a small centre star, on a dark background.

A northstar, not a decoration

The mark is a four-pointed star: four blades around a smaller star at the centre. It is drawn from the north star and the old craft of navigation, a fixed point you steer by. That is also how we think about the studio: a clear direction, held over the long term.

The four directions carry the rest of the meaning. They stand for orientation, focus and durability, and for the balance between vision and execution. Three readings of one shape:

North Star Orientation
Four directions Clarity & balance
Compass Focus & direction

A mark with that much riding on it has to hold up everywhere. As a favicon it shrinks to a handful of gold pixels; as a banner it runs half a metre wide. Anything that only looks right at one size is not finished.

The problem: it looked drawn

Our first versions were traced by hand and then tidied up. They were close, but not right. Up close the curves carried small dents, there was a slight kink near each tip, and the centre star tapered to a needle so thin it disappeared at small sizes. It read as a sketch, not a mark.

Two versions of the mark side by side; the right one is cleaner and the centre star is less needle-like. — Left, the earlier mark; right, the rebuilt one. The clearest change is the centre star, from a needle to a point that still reads at small sizes, but every edge was redrawn.

The cause was simple. Each edge was stitched together from several separate curve segments. They lined up in direction but not in curvature, so the outline quietly sped up and slowed down along its length. The eye reads that change as a bump.

The fix: stamp it from circles

We rebuilt every edge as a single circular arc, as if each curve had been stamped out by one large circle. A circular arc has constant curvature, which makes a bump mathematically impossible. Each blade became two arcs meeting at two sharp points: a wide outer arc and a tighter inner one. We fitted one blade and mirrored it four times, so the mark is exactly symmetric rather than approximately so.

Construction diagram of the mark: a bounding square, vertical, horizontal and diagonal axes, and the circles whose arcs form the blades and the centre star. — The whole mark sits in a square, on vertical, horizontal and diagonal axes. Every curve is an arc of one of these circles: the large circles cut the blades, a small one holds the centre star. The four blades are one shape, mirrored; only the eight tips are corners.

A single blade of the mark: a crescent with one wide outer curve, one tighter inner curve and two sharp tips. — A single blade: one wide outer arc, one tighter inner arc, two sharp tips, mirrored four times to build the mark.

The tips are deliberate: about thirty degrees, sharp but not fragile. They are the only corners in the whole mark; everything between them is a clean arc.

Small decisions that only matter at small sizes

The centre star received the same treatment, then one extra adjustment: we blunted its points a little. At a four-degree needle it vanished inside a browser tab. At roughly fifteen degrees it survives down to sixteen pixels and still reads as a star. We also gave the favicon a transparent background, so it sits cleanly on a light or a dark tab.

None of this is meant to be noticed. That is rather the point. Craft at this level is felt more than seen, and a studio that says it builds products to last should hold its own mark to the same standard.

Written by Michel Mrose · Aisterpiece Studios

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