Nous · Brand Mark · Edition II
The Eye.
Construction
01Nous's mark is a circle and a circle. The outer ring is centred; the inner pupil is offset north-east by (+15, +8) in the 200-unit viewBox — small enough that it reads as "an eye", large enough that it reads as "an eye reading", not staring. The magic is in the asymmetry.
Geometry, in full
- Outer ring: centre
(100, 100), radius86, stroke4, no fill. - Pupil: centre
(115, 108), radius19, filled solid. - Offset
(+15, +8)— reading the first word of the next line. - Pupil-to-iris ratio
19/86 ≈ 22%— an alert, reading eye, not a dilated or constricted one. - ViewBox
0 0 200 200· renders cleanly from 16 px to 2 m.
Favicon variant · 16–32 px
- Outer ring: radius
80, stroke14— four times thicker, to remain visible at 1-pixel render scale. - Pupil:
(116, 110)radius28— slightly enlarged for legibility. - Same viewBox so the two versions swap cleanly at CSS breakpoints.
Previous mark
Edition I was a compass of eight olive leaves around a wine-dark dot. Edition II keeps the wine dot, throws out the leaves, and gives the dot a ring to sit inside. The wine is the same; the story is different.
Variants
02Three canonical colourways cover every usage. On a paper ground, ink ring + wine pupil. On an ink ground, candle ring + wine-dark pupil. Single-colour mono where a brand requires it — every shape inherits currentColor, so it tints with the parent text.
Scale
03From 16 px in the browser tab to 1024 px on a cover. The canonical mark stays readable down to about 32 px; below that, the favicon variant takes over — same eye, thicker stroke.
Rule of thumb: use nous-mark.svg at 32 px and above; nous-favicon.svg below. Both share the same viewBox, so a CSS @media or srcset swap is a one-liner.
Wordmark & Lockup
04The mark sits left of the wordmark, separated by a vertical hairline. The Greek Νοῦς is set in GFS Didot; the italic — Nous beneath it in Cormorant Garamond, weight 300.
Clear space around the lockup equals the pupil diameter — about 38 units in the viewBox. The rule sits at 1/3 of the lockup width. The eye is always to the left of the word: the eye is what reads the word.
In Context
05
Νοῦς·
nous.design — The Philosophy
Νοῦς·
nous.design — By lamplight
Palette
06The mark uses only four colours. Every token comes from design/styles/tokens.css.
#1A1814
#6E2F3A
#ECE3CF
#C08B97
Deliverables
07On Edition I — the compass
The predecessor mark — eight olive leaves around a wine-dark dot — is preserved at the edition-I-compass git tag. To inspect a specific file at that revision: git show edition-I-compass:logo/svg/nous-mark.svg. To restore the whole Edition I asset set into the working tree: git checkout edition-I-compass -- logo/. The design study that led to this Edition II mark — with all three directions presented at size — is at logo/redesign/logo-exploration.html.