COMPAXThe mark
A conversation with a compass in it
A speech bubble with the needle where the words would go. Three corners are turned and the fourth is not: the sharp one is the tail, and it sits at the bottom left, where a message somebody else sent has its own. The edge is one unbroken line at one weight, and the needle's half-width is exactly that weight — the blade is the solid thing inside an outline, and a thin needle in a heavy ring is the first part to disappear at small sizes.
The drawing lives in code, not in a file: app/lib/src/ui/logo.dart holds the numbers, and just app logo writes them out to landing/assets/compax.svg. There is no second copy to forget to update. The downloads above are built in the browser from that same SVG.
On a screen
Where it actually lands
A swatch of dark ground is a claim about a dark ground; this is the thing itself, on a monitor, in a room. The screen runs three pages of a site wearing the mark — an opening, the mark on every ground it is allowed on, and a row of cards — and the camera comes in once and turns slowly rather than easing in and out of each one. A mark is never seen on its own; it is seen at the top left of something. Nothing here is a model or a photograph — the desk, the monitor, the keyboard and the mouse are extruded rounded rectangles, and the screen is a canvas drawn from the same two paths as everything else.
Needs WebGL. Without it the panel is left out rather than replaced by a picture of itself.
Room
Clear space, and the smallest it goes
Keep a quarter of the mark's own width free on every side. It is measured off the mark rather than in pixels so it scales with it — at any size, the gap is a quarter of what you just placed.
The margin
Nothing enters the hatched band — not type, not a rule, not the edge of a card.
Smallest sizes
16px is the floor, and it is the size the drawing was decided at: the tail is a corner rather than a spur, and the edge carries no dots, because both were the parts that went first.
Grounds
On the surfaces it has to live on
The mark is repainted whole, never in parts. On anything pale it is the page's ink; on anything dark it is the page's paper. It is one tone in both cases, which is the whole reason it survives being put on either.
Over a photograph, or anything else whose brightness you do not control, put the mark on a plate rather than hoping. A white capsule with the mark inside it is a decision; a mark floating over a sky is a coin toss that gets lost half the time.
Colour
One grey, and the inks around it
The file itself is a mid grey. That is deliberate and it is not the ink anybody sees on the site: the two places the raw colour does show — a browser tab and the application's own header — land on a light background and a dark one with no chance to ask which comes first. A mid grey survives both; an ink survives one and vanishes into the other.
Click a swatch to copy its hex. The three application tones are the product's own, out of app/lib/src/ui/theme.dart; the two page inks are the site's, out of landing/styles.css.
Type
Two faces, chosen by what is being said
Poppins sets the Latin. It has no Cyrillic at all, and a font stack falls through per character in silence — so a Russian headline was being set in whatever the machine happened to have. Montserrat answers that: geometric, circular bowls, the same upright monoline weight, and its Ukrainian і ї є ґ are drawn rather than borrowed. The whole page turns over rather than only its Cyrillic, because two faces inside one sentence show their seam exactly where the technical words are.
Poppins · Latin
Montserrat · Cyrillic
The lock-up
COMPAX in 700, all caps, set solid. The gap between mark and word is a third of the mark's width, and the mark's height matches the cap height — not the line box.
Reversed
The same lock-up with both halves turned over together. The mark never keeps its light tone while the word goes dark, or the other way round.
In writing
How the name is written in a sentence
Compax is a messenger with a group wallet in it.
Send it from Compax, or from any wallet you already have.
Do
One capital C, the rest lower case, in the sentence's own face and weight. The mark may stand immediately before the word when a line needs it, at the size of a capital letter.
COMPAX is a messenger with a group wallet in it.
Send it from CompaX™, or from any wallet you already have.
Don't
Not all caps in running text — that is the wordmark, and a wordmark inside a sentence shouts. No inner capitals, no trademark sign, no colour of its own.
Around it
The shapes that come with it
Two, and both are grounds rather than marks. They go behind things; they never stand in for the logo and they never sit inside it. Each is painted here at the size the site paints it, so a texture on this page is the same texture a visitor has just scrolled past.
Not this
Ten things not to do to it
Each of these is drawn wrong on purpose, so the wrongness is visible rather than described.