The Syntheus mark.

The full lockup is the default treatment everywhere the brand needs to be named: marketing site, contracts, slide masters, social headers. The icon stands alone wherever the wordmark would be redundant or wouldn't fit — favicons, app icons, social avatars, and chrome under 24px tall.

The icon.

The icon is the smallest, most durable expression of the brand. It must read at 16px and at 1024px without losing its identity. Native SVG viewBox is 64 × 64; PNG masters ship at 256 / 512 / 1024 (1×/2×/3×).

The mark holds balance — a yin and yang in form, sitting at the intersection of the natural and digital worlds where the studio works. Syntheus brings technical solutions to real human problems; empathy is what bridges the two.

The horizontal lockup pairs the icon with the wordmark on a shared baseline. Used wherever the brand needs to read at a glance and the surface accommodates a wordmark. Native SVG viewBox is 280 × 64.

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  Default

  Color treatment on cream paper. The primary use across most surfaces.

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  Brand ground

  White lockup on a single-accent ground — sage-deep here. Used on section heroes and brand-forward surfaces.

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  Reverse — on ink

  White lockup on the ink-900 ground. Used on dark sections, footer, and the contact band.

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  Mono ink

  Black lockup for single-color print, low-fidelity reproduction, and any context where color isn't reliable.

The icon is built on an 8 × 8 modular grid. Every edge, curve, and stroke aligns to the base-8 unit — the same grid the clearspace and minimum-size rules derive from.

Preserve 2X of clearspace on every side of the lockup. X is one cell of the construction grid (icon height / 8), so 2X is two grid cells — 16 design units, scaling proportionally with the mark. The same rule applies to the icon when used standalone.

Below the minimum sizes the mark loses fidelity and the wordmark loses legibility. Use the standalone icon when the lockup would fall under threshold.

Lockup minimum120 px · 0.75 in / 19 mm

Icon minimum16 px · 0.16 in / 4 mm

Scale range

16 px (min)

24 px

40 px

64 px

120 px

The lockup is approved on cream paper, on ink-900, and on the deep stops (700+) of any accent ramp. Avoid mid-stop accent grounds (200–500), photographic backgrounds, and any combination where the lockup falls below 4.5:1 contrast against the ground.

Do

Default lockup on cream paper.

White lockup on ink-900.

White lockup on sage-deep — brand-forward surfaces.

Don't

Default lockup on a mid-stop accent. Contrast collapses.

White lockup on a light surface. No contrast.

Color lockup on a clashing accent. Hue conflict — sage vs terracotta.

Eight ways to break the mark — geometry, color, context. Each example violates the rules above. The mark is a system; treat it as one.