Commit Graph
3 Commits
Author SHA1 Message Date
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5.5 0766349397 feat(brand): the browser tab icon is the full logo (#5267)
release / web (push) Successful in 1m15s
release / govulncheck (push) Successful in 47s
release / go (push) Successful in 2m19s
release / integration (push) Successful in 5m34s
release / Build signed APK (releases and dev) (push) Successful in 6m23s
release / Attach APK to the Release (tag releases only) (push) Skipped
release / android (push) Successful in 6m10s
release / Build + push container image (push) Successful in 1m30s
release / Verify release artifacts (tag releases only) (push) Skipped
The tab icon was a hand-drawn reduced hat, made because the traced art loses
detail at 16px. A redrawing reads as a different logo. The tab icon now uses
the same traced mark as the header: a high-resolution screen draws a tab icon
from 32px, where it holds, and at 16px it keeps the logo's shape.

The drawn reduced mark had no other consumer, so it leaves the generator,
and mark-small.svg (referenced nowhere) is removed. Regenerating changed only
favicon.svg and favicon.png; every other brand asset is byte-identical.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-10-07 15:19:10 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 b06a1adfe8 feat(brand): draw a reduced mark so the favicon reads at 16px
The full hat does not resolve below ~32px, which the header worked around
by sizing up. A browser tab cannot: it renders the favicon at 16px and
does not ask. There the mark was a blob.

Deriving a small form from the traced art does not work, and this is the
non-obvious part. Hole-filling, morphological smoothing and dropping
components were all tried; every one of them preserves the overall
silhouette, and the overall silhouette — dominated by a long diagonal
plume — is precisely what fails. The result each time was a diagonal
smear that reads as no object at all.

So the reduced form is drawn rather than derived: a strong horizontal
brim under a crown that peaks left of centre, a band slit so the two do
not fuse, and a short pointed plume. Same lean and proportions as the
full mark, detail removed instead of minified.

favicon.svg and favicon.png now use it; apple-touch, icon-512 and the
Android launcher icons keep the full art, being large enough for it. The
plume carries the accent, which measures 3.04:1 on obsidian and 5.43:1 on
the light ground — both clear of the 3:1 graphics floor.

Also corrects the accent-on-iron figure in the generator's comment from
2.80:1 to 2.70:1. The real --fs-iron is #1E2228; 2.80 came from measuring
against a value I had guessed rather than read.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01SQ31KQpYbStyK5y58UmPLH
2026-09-09 13:49:31 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 5593f7ce17 feat(brand): replace the M mark with the traced bard-hat logo
test-web / test (push) Successful in 44s
android / Build + lint + test (push) Successful in 5m9s
The mark is now a feathered hat with an arc of eighth notes, traced from
the operator's reference artwork at 99.74% IoU. The hat takes the text
colour and the note arc holds the accent — the same construction the M
used, and for the same reason: parchment on a light surface is invisible,
so the silhouette has to flip with its background while the accent stays
constant.

This reverses the subject-neutrality argument recorded in Minstrel's
design system, which held that depicting a bard would tell a new user the
app is for renaissance-faire music and had twice rejected a hat. The
operator commissioned this artwork and chose it with that objection on the
table; the record is updated rather than silently contradicted.

Both accent-filled alternatives were measured and rejected: #4A6B5C is
3.04:1 on obsidian and 2.80:1 on the raised iron, so an accent hat drops
under the 3:1 graphics floor as soon as it sits on a card.

tools/gen-brand-assets.py is the single source for the four copies, which
cannot share a file because each needs a different colour mechanism —
currentColor inlined, a prefers-color-scheme swap in the favicon, literal
fills in mark.svg, flat pixels in the rasters. Hand-copying 20KB of path
data four ways is how a silhouette change lands in three of them.

Two notes on the trace, both non-obvious: it runs on the original
antialiased greyscale rather than a binary mask, because tracing a
supersampled mask scores ~100% IoU by reproducing the pixel staircase
exactly — a perfect number for jagged art at 120KB of path, versus 99.74%
at 20KB. And potrace reads PBM where bit 1 is black, so the ink mask is
inverted going in; backwards, it traces the background and still emits a
plausible-looking SVG.

The header lockup moves 20px → 28px: the hat carries far more detail than
the M and does not resolve below ~32px. The 16px browser-tab favicon is
still a blob at that size and is not addressed here.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01SQ31KQpYbStyK5y58UmPLH
2026-09-09 12:52:57 -04:00