In August a client told me they'd changed their mind about a mark I'd finished in June. Nothing was wrong with it. They wanted the other one, the alternate that had been sitting near the back of the brand book for two months, because it would be easier to embroider.
Fair enough. Swapping the artwork took an afternoon.
Fixing everything the old mark had been quietly deciding for the rest of the book took considerably longer, and that's the part of this work I keep underestimating. A logo isn't really a drawing. It's a drawing plus a set of rules the drawing generated, and most of those rules are written down as prose somewhere. Prose doesn't update itself when you change the picture above it.
I had two identities running this summer. Maxematics is a tutoring practice run by a high-school student named Max. Totipotent Capital is a venture fund. Nothing about them is alike. They ran into the same problem anyway.
Emphasis, or substitution
Max asked whether max should be visually separated from ematics. It's a good question. The name is a portmanteau, and portmanteaus fail silently: if a reader doesn't catch max inside it, their eye autocorrects to "mathematics" and the founder's name vanishes. Nobody notices this happening, including the founder, which is what makes it worth fixing.
The obvious answer is to set MAX in capitals. I built that version and put it beside the logomark, and it confirmed what Max had already sensed on his own. It collides. Lowercase, the logotype is one flat band of weight, which makes it a quiet partner to a mark that is deliberately loud. Capitalising three letters raises a second stack of mass eight pixels from the mark's tallest point.
Which is a useful failure, because it points at the actual distinction. There are two ways to make part of a word stand apart. You can add emphasis — change the case, the weight, or the colour — and everyone will read it instantly. All three of those levers work by adding visual weight, which is the one resource the logomark has already spent. Or you can substitute: leave every letter at the same size, weight and colour, and swap one of them for a different form. Nothing gets bigger. It costs no space and no ink.
Maxematics happens to contain the right candidate letter. In max, the x is the last letter of the name, and in mathematics it's both the multiplication sign and the symbol for the unknown quantity, which is the thing a student is there to solve for. It was also already drawn inside the logomark as one of four operators. So a true × marks where max ends, states the category without a tagline, and ties the logotype to the mark next to it.
I built the other nine treatments anyway, including the ones I wasn't going to recommend. The trade-offs are the useful part of the exercise, and a client who can see why the safe option is safe tends to make a braver choice than one who's handed a single recommendation.
What decided it wasn't which one looked best on my monitor. The navigation bar renders the logotype at roughly 20 pixels tall. At that size a difference in weight loses most of its effect and a difference in colour loses more, and both vanish entirely in a black-and-white flyer, an embroidered polo, or a fax-grade PDF. The × is a bolder and simpler shape than a lowercase x, so it still holds at 16px and in a single ink.
The T-shirt problem
The horizontal lockup is primary, but it's the wrong shape for a tote, a stamp, or a square avatar. That's a separate decision and I didn't try to guess it. I drew three vertical stacks as finished artwork and let Max choose by letter, with the trade-off written under each one.
B won because both lines sit on the same measure, with MAX over ematics. That's the device the original logo already used, so the new one reads as a continuation of it rather than a replacement.
178 files, one source
The old identity existed as a raster logomark, which is the kind of thing a screen printer sends back. But the client's maxematics RGB.ai turned out to be what most .ai files are underneath, a PDF container, and pdftocairo -svg pulled true vector paths straight out of page 2. The mark geometry had been in there the whole time. Only the colour had ever changed.
So the package isn't a folder of exports. It's a 324-line geometry.py that defines the mark and the wordmark once in font units, and every lockup, colourway and format renders out of it. The logotype is Sora at weight 700, outlined with fontTools rather than referenced as a font, so nothing in the package depends on a typeface being installed anywhere. Headless Chrome does the rendering: --screenshot for the PNGs, --print-to-pdf for PDFs that are genuinely vector rather than a picture of vector.
One source, 178 files, and no way for the variants to drift apart. That matters less for correctness than you'd think. Where it actually paid off was the fifth colourway: mono-violet, the whole mark in one brand-coloured ink. It's one screen instead of two at a T-shirt printer, which makes it the cheapest way to stay on brand, and it's the one everybody forgets to ship. It exists here because adding it cost a line of configuration instead of an afternoon of exports.
The reversal
Totipotent Capital started in April with about ten directions in parallel. Monograms, lattices, molecules, isometric stacks.
By June one of them had converged into Mark 1B, a faceted geometric cell, and the whole brand book got built around it. A design narrative tying the lattice to mitosis. Usage rules written against facet legibility. A wordmark drawn to match. Approved, delivered, done.
Then August, and the sentence at the top of this piece. They picked Mark 2, the radiating hub that had been sitting in the typography explorer as an alternate since June, and the reason had nothing to do with how it looked. It was simpler and more practical for print, collateral and swag. Manufacturability beat concept two months after concept had won, which is not the outcome anyone plans for and is probably the right one.
The winning mark was a PNG
Mark 2 existed only as a 1482×832 raster. Worse, the client had hand-edited it — opening gaps between the spokes and the nodes, shrinking the nodes — and those edits existed only inside two screenshots.
So the screenshots became the spec. The mark measured 432px wide in them, which sets the scale at 1px = 2.985 units, and from there: spoke width 16.6, node radius 26.5, hub radius 59.7. The gaps ran anywhere from 16 to 40 units, which is what nudging eight spokes by hand looks like when you measure it. The refinement was to keep their numbers and make the gap a single one.
Then it was rebuilt parametrically rather than auto-traced. Tracing would have frozen the wobble. Rebuilding kept the eight spoke angles and lengths exactly and turned terminals, weights and spacing into parameters, which is what made the next round of notes cheap to answer.
One of them sounded like taste: make the dots echo the dot over the i. With the client's own node size and the sizing rule they'd asked for, the mark's node lands at radius 6.47 against the wordmark's tittle at 6.63. Within 2.5%. Nothing had to be forced, the arithmetic had already agreed, and I got to send a one-line reply instead of a proposal.
Another was genuinely ambiguous. "Roughly 20% taller than the wordmark text" resolves to a 17% shrink or a 36% shrink depending on whether text means the whole wordmark or just its cap height. I built both and showed them side by side rather than pick one and hope.
The third is my favourite, because the complaint and the defect were different things. "Add back a small serif break on the final t" reads like a request for a detail. The real problem was that the final t had no foot at all: stem, foot and tail were one continuous shape, which is exactly why it had stopped reading as a letter. The fix was to drop in the middle t translated 389.05 units to the right, making it byte-identical to its three siblings.
What the old mark had been deciding
My first pass at this replaced the artwork the client had commented on and stopped there. Which meant the brand book spent about a day describing a "faceted, crystalline" cell directly beside a picture of a radiating hub. Nobody caught it because nobody reads a brand book front to back, including, apparently, the person who wrote it.
Fourteen instances of artwork had to change: six lockups and eight standalone glyphs. That was the mechanical half and it was fine. The other half was finding every sentence the retired mark had written.
Section 01 and the first design-narrative card were both arguments about a lattice, so neither survived; both got rewritten around a hub, eight unequal spokes and free-standing nodes. The minimum size moved too. Mark 1B was square and its failure mode was facet legibility, while Mark 2 is 2:1 and its failure mode is the spoke-to-node gaps closing up. The mark occupies 32.8% of the lockup, so holding it above its own 48px floor pushed the digital minimum from 100px to 150px, and added a mark-alone row that hadn't existed before: 48px for the standard cut, 28px for the compact one. The improper-usage list went from five entries to seven, because "don't close the gaps" is a rule that only makes sense about this mark.
None of that ports across untouched. A usage grid is downstream of geometry, and none of it shows up in a side-by-side of the two marks, which is why it's the part that gets skipped.
The mark is what the client looks at. The system underneath it is what they'll be living in for the next several years, and it's the part that has to survive the mark changing, which sooner or later it will.