One rule,
one mark.

01The rule that governs everything below

The brand never spends the register's color

Most identity systems have one hot color and spend it on the logo. This one runs two, and the word Untested owns the second outright.

The claims this thesis leans on hardest have never been measured. If the design made those look as settled as the measured ones, the design would be lying on the argument's behalf. So the palette is split, and the split is enforced: vermilion marks structure, amber marks doubt, and they never appear in the same component.

The test is mechanical. If a choice makes an unproven claim look certain, the choice is wrong. That rule is why the month strip fills its eight build squares in soft white rather than amber, and why no amount of brand color is allowed to reach a graded claim.

02The mark

The chevron

A single flat silhouette — no outline, no gradient, no second color. It carries the name and nothing else, which is why it survives being small.

The mark carries no color of its own

The artwork of record is a single flat silhouette, vectorised to site/assets/lintel-mark.svg and inlined in the markup rather than loaded as an image, so it paints in currentColor and takes the accent from the stylesheet. That is not tidiness — it is the fix for a specific failure. When the accent moved from vermilion to amber, the mark did not move with it, and the identity shipped with a logo in one color and a system in another. A mark that holds no color of its own cannot drift from one again.

04Color

Six colors, and one held in reserve

The palette is not a mood. Six colors carry the system, and a seventh is held back for the register alone. Every pair below is measured against its ground; nothing that carries type sits below 4.5:1.

Why the register is amber, and not red

The thesis borrows its engineering discipline from avionics rather than from web development — the sheet on donor discipline argues that at length. Safety-critical practice separates two states that ordinary design collapses into one color: red is failure, amber is unverified.

Every gap in this register is unverified, not failed. Nobody has measured the objective share of an American ordinance; nobody has run the Arizona records request. Those are open questions, and marking them in the color of failure would overstate them in exactly the direction the whole project exists to avoid. Amber is the accurate signal, and it carries 9.5:1 against the ground.

It is also why vermilion can be the brand color without collision. Vermilion marks structure — where you are, what opens a section, what a link will do — and it is barred from any component that carries a grade. The two never share a box, so a red on this site never means failure.

The grades, as components

Untested solid amber, the only filled chip in the set — nobody has measured it.
Confirmed outlined slate — a source exists and has been checked.
Supported outlined warm stone — evidence points this way, short of proof.
Contested dashed soft white — the literature disagrees with itself, visibly unsettled.

06In use

What the system has to survive

Three tests, all of which this identity has failed at least once and now passes.

Stated for the record. Lintel is a working name and no trademark or domain clearance has been run — which is not the same as no conflict. The identity above is versioned with the site and will change if clearance requires it. The reasoning behind every choice on this page, including what it replaced, is recorded internally rather than argued here. More on the name and the declared interest →
An alternative identity has been proposed and not adopted — the datum mark, as a sketch.