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Brand

artifactr's identity comes from print proofing. Two inks, magenta and cyan, are the two participants: a person and an agent. Where both inks land on the same spot they overprint into a third colour, a deep indigo, which stands for the thing they share: the artifact. The mark is a proofreader's caret, the sign for "insert here", drawn as two strokes that meet at a shared tip. It also reads as the letter A.

The artifactr mark The artifactr mark

Files

Every file is a hand-authored SVG with no embedded images or fonts. Text is outlined, so nothing depends on the viewer's fonts.

File What it is Use it on
mark-light.svg The mark Light backgrounds
mark-dark.svg The mark, with a light shared tip Dark backgrounds
lockup-light.svg The mark and the wordmark Light backgrounds
lockup-dark.svg The mark and the wordmark Dark backgrounds
banner-light.svg The README banner, 1280 × 400 Light backgrounds
banner-dark.svg The README banner, 1280 × 400 Dark backgrounds
favicon.svg The mark, switching to the dark colours when the system prefers a dark scheme Browser tabs

Colours

Name Light Dark Role
Magenta #E4007C #FF4DA6 One participant: the left stroke of the mark. The site's interactive accent (#C2006A on light backgrounds, for contrast with text).
Cyan #009FE3 #38C6F4 The other participant: the right stroke of the mark. Code highlights on the site.
Overprint #2D2A8C #E4E3FF The shared artifact: the mark's tip, the wordmark, and the site's primary colour for headings and links (#B3B1FF for links on dark backgrounds).
Paper #F6F6FB #15142B Backgrounds of the banner. The site's dark scheme uses #14132A.
Graphite #5D5B80 #A3A2C8 Secondary text, such as the banner's tagline.

On paper, overlapping inks make a darker colour, so the light tip is deep indigo. On screen, overlapping light makes a lighter one, so on dark backgrounds the tip is a pale violet. Keep that logic when drawing new material in the brand's colours.

Type

Typeface Role Why
Schibsted Grotesk The wordmark (Bold, outlined), headings and body text on the site A grotesque drawn for a news publisher: plain and readable, with an editorial voice that suits a tool about editing
Fragment Mono Code on the site A monospace in the Helvetica tradition, so code sits comfortably beside the grotesque

Both are open-source (SIL Open Font License) and served by Google Fonts. The wordmark is always lowercase: artifactr.

Using the brand

  • Use the light files on light backgrounds and the dark files on dark ones; don't recolour them.
  • Keep clear space around the mark of at least a quarter of its height.
  • The mark stays legible down to 16 pixels. Below 24 pixels, use it without the wordmark.
  • Magenta and cyan stand for the two participants, so don't use them as decoration. Outside the mark, magenta only marks interaction on the site (a hovered link, the current page), and the overprint indigo is the working colour for everything else.
  • Don't stretch, rotate, outline or add effects to the mark, and don't set the wordmark in another typeface.
  • In a README, switch between the light and dark banners with a <picture> element, as the repository's README does.