XRAPH/Identity

The wordmark, with a trademark on it

Archivo is variable on the width axis from 62 to 125, and the site already treats that as the signature of the system. This revision spends it on the mark itself. The wordmark sits at the top of the axis and the trademark at the bottom, so the legal glyph reads as part of the design rather than something bolted to the end of it.

The mark as it stood

Before this revision

XRAPH

AWide and loose at the same time. The setting ran wdth 118 with tracking at .02em. An extended cut already carries its air inside the counters, so added tracking read as a gap rather than as breathing room.+1.5px over 5 chars

BThe glyph outweighed the word. The mark sat at 21px beside a 15px wordmark whose caps are only 10.3px tall, roughly twice the cap height, which pulled the lockup’s optical centre left onto the symbol.21px vs 10.3px cap

CNo trademark glyph anywhere. Nothing in the repository set ™. The wordmark shipped in the nav, the preloader, the X-Files gate and the OG image with no legal mark on any of them. All five surfaces carry one now, on the terms set out in section 07.Was 0 occurrences

The axis, live

Archivo wdth 62 to 125

XRAPH

Wordmark wdth

Trademark wdth

Word wdth125

TM wdth62

XRAPH @15px, untracked69.8px

Vs shipping, 67.4px+2.4px

Drag either axis. The set width is computed from Archivo’s real advance table, so the readout is the width the browser will actually lay out. Cap height holds at 686 units across the whole range, which is what lets one alignment rule cover every position on the axis.

Two ways to set it

Poster scale above, 15px nav below

Axis

Adopted

XRAPH

XRAPHWorkWritingResearch

At 15px, the size it ships at in the nav

WordmarkArchivo wdth 125 / wght 800

Tracking-.005em, from +.02em

TrademarkArchivo wdth 62 / wght 600

Size ratio0.38em of the wordmark

Rise1.119em (cap-flush)

XRAPH @15px, tracked69.5px, +2.1 vs now

Shipped, on every surface. The wordmark takes the top of the axis and the trademark the bottom, so the widest and the narrowest things on the site are the same face. Nothing is borrowed from another family and there is one number to maintain. Risk: at 15px the trademark renders 2.3px tall, so it reads as a tick rather than a glyph. That is normal for a legal mark and it is why the ratio steps up below 13px.

Signal

XRAPH

XRAPHWorkWritingResearch

At 15px, the size it ships at in the nav

WordmarkArchivo wdth 104 / wght 900

Tracking+.005em

TrademarkArchivo wdth 104 / wght 700

Size ratio0.32em, in --signal

Rise1.458em (cap-flush)

XRAPH @15px, tracked60.7px, -6.7 vs now

Denser and shorter, with the trademark carrying the only colour in the mark. It buys back nearly 7px of nav width, which matters on the narrow breakpoint where the lockup competes with the nav links. Consequence: the pulsing signal dot in .mark .dot has to go, since two signal marks in one lockup cancel each other out.

Construction

Cap-flush alignment

The trademark is drawn flush to Archivo’s cap line already: its yMax is 687 against a cap height of 686, at every position on both axes. Scale it by r and the top drops to 686r, so the rise that puts it back on the cap line is fixed by the ratio alone.rise = 0.686em × (1 − r) ÷ rMeasured in the trademark’s own em, which is what vertical-align resolves against. At r = 0.38 that is 1.119em, and it never needs a second value for a second size.

The glyph’s own left sidebearing does part of the spacing work. At wdth 62 the trademark carries 23 units of left bearing and 50 of right, so the visible gap after the H is already 0.009em before any margin is added, and the lockup’s right edge sits 0.019em inside its advance. Both are corrected in the spec so the mark centres on what the eye sees.

Mark the span aria-hidden. The nav link already carries an aria-label, so leaving the glyph exposed makes a screen reader announce "trade mark" on every page.

Down the scale

Variant 01, cap-flush at every step

120pxXRAPHPoster and OG image

64pxXRAPHSection mark

22pxXRAPHX-Files, footer

15pxXRAPHNav. The mark’s primary home

13pxXRAPHRatio steps to 0.46

11pxXRAPHDrop the trademark below this

The trademark is a legal presence, not a reading task, so it is allowed to become texture at the small end. Below 13px it closes up far enough that the ratio steps from 0.38 to 0.46, which is the only responsive rule the mark needs. Under 11px, drop it: the preloader and the favicon lockup carry no trademark.

On all four grounds

data-dir a / b / c / e

XRAPHdata-dir="a" · Ink · default

XRAPHdata-dir="b" · Paper

XRAPHdata-dir="c" · Black · lime

XRAPHdata-dir="e" · White · docs

The trademark takes --ink-faint on every ground rather than a fixed grey, so it tracks the theme the way the rest of the system does. On data-dir="c" the faint token is #4A4A4A against pure black, which is the tightest contrast of the four and still holds at 22px.

The specification

what the mark is

The lockup

/* Archivo runs its width axis in both directions here: the wordmark
   at the top of the range, the trademark at the bottom. Cap height is
   686/1000 at every axis position, so one rise value lands the
   trademark flush on the cap line at every size. */
wordmark    Archivo wdth 125 / wght 800, 15px, tracking -.005em
glyph       17px, 1.13x the wordmark's cap height
trademark   Archivo wdth 62 / wght 600 at .38em of the wordmark
rise        1.119em in the trademark's own em, which is what
             vertical-align resolves a length against
bearings    .14em before it, -.05em after, correcting for the
             glyph's own 23 and 50 units at wdth 62
colour      the theme's faint ink, never a fixed grey
below 13px  the ratio steps to .46em, rise .805em
below 11px  no trademark

Where it appears

nav          every page, 15px          wdth 125 + TM
cross        /cross, 14px              wdth 125 + TM
x-files      gate and footer, 15px     wdth 125 + TM
preloader    13px, tracked .42em       wdth 125, no TM
share card   mono, letterspaced        TM in mono

/* The two that differ, and why:
   preloader   at .42em of tracking this is a spaced label rather
               than the lockup, and no glyph sits beside it.
   share card  that wordmark was never Archivo. It is mono and
               letterspaced, so the trademark follows it there. */

Using it

The mark is the property of XRAPH. The measurements above are published so that anyone reproducing it in a document, a talk or a piece of press gets the proportions right, rather than as an invitation to redraw it.