Logo

One ring, two halves

You already have your mechanism. For it to keep repeating, it needs a system that drives it. That is ExpireMate.

So the logo is not two objects standing next to each other. It is a single ring: one half is a toothed gear, and that same ring carries on as an arrow that sweeps the rest of the circle and points back into the teeth. The gear is your work. The arrow is what brings it round again.

What each element stands for

Three elements, and the line between them is the whole idea: one half is yours, the other is ours.

The gear: your work

The visits, the parts, the annual service. You built this half, and it was turning long before we arrived. That is why it is drawn in white: it is yours, not ours.

The arrow: what drives it

This is where we come in. The arrow continues your ring instead of standing beside it, because a reminder is not a separate tool bolted on the side. It is what carries one service round to the next, so the customer who would have quietly drifted away comes back instead.

The pivot: something to turn on

A gear mounted on nothing does not turn, it drifts. The pivot is the fixed point your work is seated on: the dates, the reminders and the service history, in one place.

Which is why the colour sits on the arrow and not on the gear. White is your work, green is our part in it, and you can see at a glance where one ends and the other begins.

The decisions behind it

52 : 48, not half and half

Measured along the ring, the gear takes slightly more than the arrow. The teeth reach beyond the ring, so the white half carries more visual weight than its arc alone suggests, and it is given a little less of that arc in return. The balance that matters is the one the eye reads, not the one the numbers would claim.

A gap of 13° before the tip

The arrow stops just short of the gear rather than running into it. Close the gap and the tip reads as part of the ring; open it much wider and the arrow reads as snapped off. At 13° the tip stays roughly two pixels clear on a logo drawn at 44 pixels.

A pivot, not a dot

The centre measures 100 against an opening of 179, a little over half of it. Anything smaller stops reading as an axle and becomes a speck in an empty bore, and the gear goes back to looking as though it floats.

Gear 17.8:1, arrow 10.3:1

Against this ground the gear stands at 17.8:1 and the arrow at 10.3:1. The standard asks 3:1 of a graphical element, and a saturated backdrop leaves a green accent scraping that floor. Dark is what keeps the logo readable at 44 pixels, which is the size it is actually looked at.

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Using the logo

Files

Vector, ready to drop into a deck or a document.

• /brand/mark.svgthe logo alone, on transparency
• /brand/tile.svgthe full tile, with its background
• /brand/construction.svgthe construction drawing above