A mountain inside a lens

The brief for our own logo had one rule before it had a shape: it must not look like AI slop. Image generators are good at texture and light, but they draw pixels with no understanding of curves or geometry. A mark has to survive at 16 pixels, in one colour, cut into metal or stitched into fabric, and that takes construction, not just a nice picture.

Why a mountain

The studio is named after Mount Tavor. It rises on its own from the Jezreel Valley: a single rounded dome you can see from everywhere, built on solid ground. That gave us the idea we wanted the mark to carry, which is one clear shape, standing on something firm.

It also helped that Tavor is not a jagged peak. A rounded crown is a natural fit for a mark built from circles, where a sawtooth range would have fought every curve around it.

Six marks in three days

The mark changed more than anything else on the site. In order:

1. An outlined symbol, under the studio's earlier name.
2. A horizon line with a grotesque wordmark.
3. An ink square with an ultraviolet dot.
4. A glass orb.
5. Mount Tavor's dome, split by a T cut out of the negative space.
6. The lens, which stayed.

Most of them lasted less than a day. The lens was the first one that still worked at the size of a browser tab, in one colour.

The lens

The final mark is a disc split by the ridge of Mount Tavor, so the mountain rises inside it like a moon over the horizon. The sky above the ridge is blue. The mountain is white on dark grounds and black on light ones.

Drawn by numbers

Our first plan was to draw the directions by hand in a design tool, because SVG paths written by guesswork tend to come out lumpy. The mark that shipped is generated by a short Python script instead, and the difference is that the script doesn't guess. It draws with exact geometry:

• The mark sits in a 64 by 64 box, on a disc with a radius of 28.
• The ridge follows a smooth curve with a rounded crown and steep flanks. Two numbers set how wide the crown is and how sharply the sides fall.
• Every other measurement, from the summit's height to the gaps between shapes, is a number in the same script, so the mark can be redrawn exactly at any size.

The wordmark is set in Geist: "Tavor" in Medium and "Digital" in Regular, in grey, tracked slightly tight. The letters are converted to outlines by the same script, so the logo files work anywhere without the font installed.

The rules that came with it

• Clear space around the mark is half its height.
• Never redraw the ridge or rotate the mark.
• Never put the two-tone mark on blue.
• Test every change at favicon size, and in one colour.

The palette is deliberately small: one ink, one paper and one blue.

What we learned

Construction gets a mark most of the way there. The last part is optical: curves have to meet smoothly, without a visible kink where one arc hands over to the next, and round shapes have to be drawn slightly larger than square ones to look the same size. Proportion systems like the golden ratio were useful as a sanity check, not as a way to generate the shape.

And the most useful test cost nothing: shrinking the mark to the size of a browser tab and looking at it in one colour.