# What the reference marks do

Eleven marks, fetched through Brandfetch with `scripts/fetch-references.sh`:
Notion, Linear, Mintlify, Vercel, Miro, Airtable, Intercom, PostHog, Webflow,
Claude and Slack. This is what each one is, as geometry, and what they share.
The five families in `prompt.md` section 3 are cut from this study; the
shared rules are the last section.

## The marks, one by one

| Mark | Construction | Colour and tile | What it says |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| **Notion** | A page seen in slight perspective, drawn as a black monoline outline with white inside, a serif capital N set on its face. The only reference that is an outline and the only one with a letter drawn as a letter. | Black on a white tile. | A page, the thing you write on. |
| **Linear** | A circle. Inside it, four parallel diagonal bars of increasing length, clipped by the circle: the top-right stays whole, the bottom-left breaks into stripes. | Monochrome. The app icon carries a faint metallic gradient, the flat mark none. | Lines of a plan, moving. |
| **Mintlify** | One thick stroke with fully round caps curling around a circular hole of negative space, making a leaf. The stroke is split lengthwise into a light green and a dark green. | Two tones of one hue, no tile. | A leaf: mint. |
| **Vercel** | One equilateral triangle. Nothing else. | White on a black tile. | Up: deploy, ship. |
| **Miro** | Three tall bars, each cut with a slanted top and a slanted right edge, like three strokes of a marker, reading together as an M. | Black on a bright yellow rounded tile. | Marker strokes on a whiteboard. |
| **Airtable** | A box seen from above in isometric: three flat faces, a yellow top (a parallelogram), a red left face, a blue right face, a hairline gap between them. Flat colour, no shading at all. | Three colours, no tile. | A box: a table you fill. |
| **Intercom** | A rounded square outline holding four vertical pills of different heights and a smile curve under them. The pills and the curve have round caps. | White on a black rounded tile. | A speech bubble that is also a face. |
| **PostHog** | A hedgehog in profile made of a stack of diagonal stripes for the spines and a small pointed head with one dot for the eye. Straight edges throughout. | White on black. | The mascot, as geometry. |
| **Webflow** | A W of two heavy angular strokes; the left stroke's top-left corner is rounded off, every other corner is sharp. | White on the brand blue rounded tile. | The initial. |
| **Claude** | An asterisk of twelve rays of slightly uneven length and thickness, round ends, meeting at the centre. Hand-set, not ruled. | Cream on a terracotta rounded tile. | A spark, a bloom. |
| **Slack** | Four pills, each a rounded bar with a round bump at one end, set in rotational symmetry to form a hash. | Blue, green, yellow, red on an aubergine rounded tile. | The # of a channel. |

## What they share

1. **One mark, no words.** Nothing has a wordmark in it. Notion's N is a letter
   as the object, not a name.
2. **Flat fills.** No drop shadows, no bevels, no 3D shading, no texture.
   Airtable's "3D" is three flat faces. Linear's gradient is the only one, and
   the flat version of the mark drops it.
3. **Colour is a rule, not a palette.** Either monochrome (Vercel, Linear,
   Intercom, PostHog, Notion, Miro's mark), or one saturated tile colour with a
   white or black mark on it (Webflow, Miro, Claude, Slack's tile), or several
   colours, one per copy of the primitive (Slack four, Airtable three, Mintlify
   two). Nobody has a three-colour mark on a coloured tile.
4. **Repetition is the most common construction.** Bars (Miro three, Intercom
   four, Linear four), stripes (PostHog), rays (Claude twelve), pills (Slack
   four). One primitive, repeated in a rhythm, makes the picture.
5. **Corners are sharp or fully round, never in between.** Sharp: Vercel, Miro,
   Webflow, Airtable, PostHog. Round: Slack, Intercom, Claude, Mintlify. Each
   mark commits to one.
6. **The tile.** Most marks live on a rounded square of one brand colour with
   continuous iOS-style corners; the mark fills 50 to 60% of it. Airtable and
   Mintlify stand alone with no tile.
7. **They read at 16 pixels.** Every one is a single silhouette with open gaps.
   The most primitives in any mark is Claude's twelve rays; most use two to
   four.
8. **The meaning is the product's verb or object.** A hash for channels, a box
   for tables, a leaf for mint, a triangle for up, a page for notes, a bubble
   for chat, a mascot for the ones with one. Not the category's icon: not a
   generic gear, cloud, rocket or chart.

## The five families

Each is a section of `prompt.md`, with its own rules.

- **Solid primitive** (Vercel, and Miro's bars): one or two primitives, one
  flat fill, sharp corners.
- **Repeated primitive** (Slack, Claude, Linear, Intercom, PostHog, Miro): one
  primitive repeated in a rhythm.
- **Letterform** (Notion, Webflow, Miro): the initial cut from heavy strokes.
- **Faceted object** (Airtable, Notion's page): an object as two or three flat
  isometric faces.
- **Soft stroke** (Mintlify, Intercom, Slack's pills): one thick round-capped
  stroke around a counter of negative space.