The logotype is drawn with wide spacing — handsome on a website, and a
third of the panel's header width spent on nothing. The spacing is
artwork, not typesetting, so no property adjusts it; but every pixel
column between two letters is blank, and a blank column carries no
shape. Dropping most of them moves the letters together without altering
a single letterform.
At the same 260px the capitals are now a third taller, which the
hairlines needed more than the spacing did: the A of ITA reads at a
glance instead of being rescued by a threshold.
Done at full resolution, before the downscale. Compressing columns that
are already an average of ink and paper would smear exactly the strokes
this logo can least afford to lose.
The rendered size is now read from the PNG's own header rather than kept
as a constant beside it. The spacing is adjustable and every value
changes the height; a number copied into the renderer would have drifted
and squashed the logo with nothing failing to say so.
`npm run brand:variants` renders the spacings side by side, magnified,
since this is a decision to be looked at rather than reasoned about.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_012cSY9pVhZmJUKNN7wf1Myd
The A of ITA had lost its diagonal: at 260px the hairlines of a Didone
fall below a pixel, downscaling averages them into grey, and the
panel's mid-grey cut then discarded them. What reached the shop window
was a detached serif and something closer to a lambda.
Letting more grey count as ink keeps them whole. 165 was not enough —
the diagonal came back dotted — and 195 holds it solid without
thickening the stems into mud. The number belongs to this particular
drawing, so `npm run brand:variants` renders the grid of widths and
thresholds it was chosen from, magnified, for the day the logo changes.
Width stays at 260: the header shares its line with the date, and the
main block is narrower now the week runs down the right-hand side.
The panel will redraw once when it next wakes, since the image and
therefore its content hash have changed.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_012cSY9pVhZmJUKNN7wf1Myd
vliaudatandClaude Opus 5