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Shelfery — Brand Assets

This is the venture-level counterpart to docs/company/brand-assets.md: the record of what Shelfery brand assets exist as candidates versus what is actually approved. A file's presence in brand/ventures/shelfery/ does not by itself mean it is approved — it must be listed here with an explicit approval note.

Color palette and typography — approved

See DD-SHELFERY-ADR-0001 (approved 2026-07-30) and strategy/brand-and-positioning.md for the full approved token set (terracotta/sage/warm neutrals, Playfair Display + Geist). No separate asset files back this decision — it ratifies the tokens already implemented in shelfery/src/app/globals.css and shelfery/src/app/layout.tsx.

Logo mark — approved

See DD-SHELFERY-ADR-0002 (approved 2026-07-30). The provenance record below is retained as-is since it documents how the approved geometry was built.

The jar-on-shelf mark — provenance and status

  • Origin: a Founder-supplied ChatGPT reference image (C:\Users\Stuart\Downloads\ChatGPT Image Jul 30, 2026, 02_43_42 PM.png, 1254×1254px), showing a line-art jar with a lid, on a shelf, in the approved terracotta on warm off-white. The Founder described this as "a pretty good read" — a strong candidate, not a final approval instruction.
  • Construction method: measured, not raw-autotraced. plug-in-sel2path (GIMP 3) was run against isolated crops of the reference (lid, jar, shelf) to produce raw reference traces — brand/ventures/shelfery/source/shelfery-mark-traced-raw-{lid,jar,shelf}.svg, kept for provenance only, same convention as the Devonshire "D" mark's rejected raw autotrace. The actual master was hand-built from pixel measurements (connected-component bounding boxes and row-profile scans of the source PNG via NumPy) rather than used directly, because the source has three distinct elements at three different constructions:
  • Lid and shelf bar: solid stadium/pill shapes (confirmed by row-profile scans showing a single contiguous run, not two — i.e., genuinely filled, not hollow). Built as <rect> with rx/ry equal to half the measured height.
  • Shelf legs: solid rounded-bottom bars (radius = half the measured leg width, producing a semicircular cap — confirmed by the leg narrowing to a point at its lowest measured row).
  • Jar body: a hollow line-art outline, not a fill — row scans showed two separate runs per row (left wall, right wall) with a consistent measured stroke width of 34px, matching Shelfery's existing line-art icon convention (the shelfery implementation repository's docs/ai/design-principles.md's "line-art SVG icons... stroke var(--primary)" rule). Built as a single tangent-continuous closed centerline path (vertical walls, horizontal top/bottom edges, cubic-Bézier corners with matched tangents — same construction technique as the Devonshire "D" mark's band), stroked at 34px with round joins, rather than filled.
  • The shoulder curve (neck-to-body taper) is a simplified single smooth curve, not a pixel-exact trace of the reference's two-stage taper (a small rim flare followed by a longer shoulder). This is a legibility/maintainability tradeoff, not an oversight — see "Known simplifications" below.
  • Master file: brand/ventures/shelfery/source/shelfery-mark.svg — fill="currentColor" (jar body stroke also keys off currentColor), recolor freely. viewBox="322 287 608 687", tight crop around the mark's content bounding box, matching the Devonshire/Devonside masters' own convention.
  • Colorway exports: brand/ventures/shelfery/exports/shelfery-mark-{terracotta,cream}.svg (terracotta #A6552E for light backgrounds, cream #F9F4EF for dark backgrounds) and shelfery-mark-{terracotta,cream}-{256,1024}.png (transparent background), plus shelfery-mark-square-badge-brownblack-256.png (a favicon-style badge: cream mark on the approved dark-mode PWA background #241a12), rendered via scripts/gimp_render_svg.py and scripts/gimp_compose_badge.py.
  • Reference-only files: brand/ventures/shelfery/source/shelfery-mark-traced-raw-{lid,jar,shelf}.svg (raw GIMP autotrace, rejected as final geometry for the reasons above) and brand/ventures/shelfery/exports/shelfery-mark-crop-reference-{lid,jar,shelf}.png (the exact source crops the geometry was measured from) — kept for provenance/re-derivation, not for reuse as final assets.

Known simplifications (accepted as-is at approval)

  • The jar's neck/shoulder taper is one smooth cubic curve rather than the reference's two-stage taper (a small ~11px flare right at the rim, then a longer shoulder). Visually close but not pixel-identical — see the side-by-side render produced during this work if a tighter match is wanted.
  • The bottom-corner radius was estimated from a partial data set — the reference's bottom edge is cut off by the color-threshold right around its final rows, so the exact flat-bottom width was extrapolated rather than measured directly.
  • Checked against Shelfery's other line-art icons for stroke-weight consistency down to a 16px favicon frame as part of the 2026-07-30 icon regeneration (shelfery repo, docs/ai/implementation-blueprints.md App Rename Runbook §0) — reads cleanly at that size.

Wordmark lockup — approved

See DD-SHELFERY-ADR-0002 (approved 2026-07-30). The provenance record below is retained as-is since it documents how the approved lockup was built.

Provenance and construction

  • Direction chosen: a ChatGPT-generated mockup ("Direction 3: Pantry-Label-Inspired Small-Caps Serif" — tracked small-caps serif) plus a separate, detailed ChatGPT-authored typography/layout brief (typeface candidates, tracking range, exact mark-height/gap/alignment ratios in a cap-height=100-unit system). Per the Founder's explicit instruction, the brief's color guidance was not used — colors are the already-approved brand palette (DD-SHELFERY-ADR-0001), not whatever the brief suggested.
  • Typeface: Spectral SC, Medium (weight 500) — the brief's preferred choice, confirmed by measurement rather than assumed: the jar mark's own line weight (34 native units, ≈7.7 units at this lockup's scale) is lighter than all three candidate typefaces' natural stem weight (Spectral SC Medium ≈15.8 units, Spectral SC SemiBold ≈19.0, Alegreya SC Medium ≈16.6, each measured at cap-height=100 via rendered-glyph pixel scans). Medium is the closest of the three to the mark's weight, not "too light" as the brief's own hedge assumed — SemiBold would have moved further from a visual match, not closer. (The rendered three-way comparison used to make this call was a working file, not a production asset — removed after the decision was made; the measurements above are the durable record of why Medium was chosen.) Font obtained from Google Fonts (fonts.gstatic.com, Spectral SC v15, weight 500).
  • Tracking: 0.17em (the brief's own starting value), selected after producing comparison proofs at 0.14/0.16/0.17/0.18/0.20em — 0.17 read as the most balanced: open enough to feel "label-tracked" without the word losing cohesion as one unit.
  • Optical kerning: computed directly from each glyph's ink bounding box (not eyeballed) — every adjacent pair landed within a tight 43–45 unit optical gap at uniform 0.17em tracking except RY, which measured 29.7 units (visibly tighter than the rest). A +15 unit kern was added specifically to that pair, which brought it to 44.7 units, in line with the others. No other pair needed adjustment.
  • Case: tracked equal-height uppercase (not title case, not true small caps with an oversized initial), per the brief.
  • Geometry (cap height = 100 units is the base measurement throughout):
  • Horizontal: mark height 155 units (of the 150–160 permitted range), gap 42 units (of 40–45), wordmark vertical center placed 3 units above the mark's geometric bounding-box center (of the instructed 2–4 unit range) to compensate for the mark's shelf-heavy visual weight. Revised 2026-07-30, same day, after Founder review: the wordmark read too large next to the mark at this cap height, so the wordmark (only — mark unchanged at 155 units) was scaled down to 75% (effective cap height 75 units), with the gap and the vertical optical offset scaled down in the same proportion (gap 42→31.5, offset 3→2.25) so their ratio to the text stays exactly as calibrated — only the wordmark's overall size against a fixed mark changed, not the underlying spacing logic.
  • Stacked: mark width 30% of total wordmark width (of the 28–32% range), gap from the shelf feet to the wordmark cap-top of 42 units (of 38–45). Not revised — the size complaint was specific to the horizontal lockup; the stacked lockup is unchanged from its original build.
  • Both checked at 32/64/128/512px render heights: serifs stay legible, the RY pair reads as connected (not disconnected or cramped), and the wordmark does not overpower the mark at any tested size.
  • Mark geometry: unaltered — the approved-candidate mark's paths are reused verbatim (uniform scale + position only, per the brief's own constraint), wrapped in <g id="shelfery-mark">.
  • Files:
  • Master/editable: brand/ventures/shelfery/source/shelfery-lockup-{horizontal,stacked}.svg (wordmark already converted to paths, fill="currentColor", wrapped in <g id="shelfery-wordmark">) and shelfery-lockup-{horizontal,stacked}-editable.svg (live <text> version for further editing in a design tool that has Spectral SC installed — the RY kern is noted inline as a comment since live text can't carry a per-pair kern override in this simple form).
  • Colorway exports: brand/ventures/shelfery/exports/shelfery-lockup-{horizontal,stacked}-{light,dark}.svg and matching -{512,1024}.png — transparent background, single-color (light = terracotta #A6552E for use on light surfaces, dark = cream #F9F4EF for use on dark surfaces), matching the mark's own transparent-export convention. These are the actual production assets, not previews.
  • A combined, backgrounds-included reference sheet (all four combinations composited onto their intended backgrounds, for visual review only — not itself a production asset): shelfery-lockup-preview-sheet.png.

Asset register

Asset Type Status Source file Export file(s) Notes
Jar-on-shelf mark (standalone) Vector mark, two colorways Approved — DD-SHELFERY-ADR-0002 brand/ventures/shelfery/source/shelfery-mark.svg brand/ventures/shelfery/exports/shelfery-mark-{terracotta,cream}.svg, shelfery-mark-{terracotta,cream}-{256,1024}.png Measured/reconstructed from a Founder-supplied reference image; see simplifications above. Wired into shelfery's favicon/PWA icons as of 2026-07-30.
Jar-on-shelf mark square badge Raster, dark background Approved — DD-SHELFERY-ADR-0002 (derived; composited from shelfery-mark-cream.svg) brand/ventures/shelfery/exports/shelfery-mark-square-badge-brownblack-256.png #241a12 background (approved dark-mode PWA theme color), cream mark. Same composition used for shelfery's regenerated favicon/apple-touch-icon/PWA icons.
Wordmark lockup, horizontal Vector, mark + Spectral SC Medium paths Approved — DD-SHELFERY-ADR-0002 brand/ventures/shelfery/source/shelfery-lockup-horizontal.svg brand/ventures/shelfery/exports/shelfery-lockup-horizontal-{light,dark}.svg, -{512,1024}.png 0.17em tracking, +15 unit RY kern; mark unaltered. Used in shelfery's Home hero.
Wordmark lockup, stacked Vector, mark + Spectral SC Medium paths Approved — DD-SHELFERY-ADR-0002 brand/ventures/shelfery/source/shelfery-lockup-stacked.svg brand/ventures/shelfery/exports/shelfery-lockup-stacked-{light,dark}.svg, -{512,1024}.png Mark at 30% of wordmark width, 42-unit gap to cap-top. Used in shelfery's Sign in/Sign up/Onboarding/Invite screens.
Color palette Token set Approved — — See DD-SHELFERY-ADR-0001.
Typography (Playfair Display + Geist) Typeface selection Approved — — See DD-SHELFERY-ADR-0001. UI/product typography only — the wordmark lockup above intentionally uses a different typeface (Spectral SC), a common lockup convention where the logotype and the product's UI type differ.

How an asset gets added here

Same process as the company-level register — see docs/company/brand-assets.md. An agent may draft a proposed row after producing a candidate export but must not mark it approved.

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