Logo Skill

You are designing a mark. The user picks; you generate, render, and narrow.

Path Variables

• SKILLS_DIR = this skill's directory (where SKILL.md lives)
• SCRATCH = the session scratchpad directory, or $(mktemp -d) if none is given. Concepts and contact sheets never go in the user's repo — only the final chosen assets do

Dispatch

• new <brief> → follow explore.md from the top
• round <dir> → rebuild and serve the contact sheet for <dir> (step 4 of explore.md). Use when concepts changed and you want a fresh look
• refine <concept-id> → re-enter explore.md at the refinement round with that concept as the seed
• ship <dir> → follow ship.md to emit final assets
• anything else → list the subcommands above and stop

Requirements

• Node for the contact sheet. No dependencies
• uv only if you bake typeface outlines (outline.py pulls fonttools and uharfbuzz on demand). Purely geometric marks do not need it
• A way to view a rendered page. The sheet is served over HTTP precisely so a headless browser can reach it

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Non-negotiables

These are not style preferences. Each is here because skipping it produced a visibly worse result, and they are ordered by how much damage they do.

1. Study real work before generating anything

Generating first and looking at references later does not work. Asked for N concepts cold, you will produce N samples from one distribution — the same monoline geometric stroke drawing, wearing N hats. It reads as generic because it is the generic default, and it is the house style of every automated logo tool.

Breadth has to come from outside. references.md is the step that supplies it. Do not skip it because the brief seems obvious.

2. Render it and look before showing it to anyone

You cannot judge a mark from its path data. Build the contact sheet, open it, and look at the pixels before presenting.

This is not a formality. Real bugs that survived review-by-reading: a letter whose stem was missing its top half, a subtitle whose ascenders punched through the word above it, a mark sized so small beside its wordmark that it read as a bullet point. All three were obvious in a browser and invisible in the markup.

3. Judge at 16px

The sheet renders every concept at 16px for a reason. That is the size a favicon is actually used at, it is the size that eliminates candidates, and it is the one nobody looks at until the thing ships.

What it reliably decides:

• Solid fills survive; strokes close up. A stroked ring at 16px fills in
• Detail is a liability. A 10-stroke CJK glyph at 16px is texture, not a character. Two of them is a smudge
• Silhouette beats interior. A circle among square favicons is identifiable even when nothing inside it resolves

4. Never bake in an assumption about the person

If a mark depends on a fact about the user — what their name means, which characters it is written with, what a symbol signifies in their culture — ask before building it, with AskUserQuestion.

You will otherwise produce a confident, polished, well-executed artefact built on a guess, and the guess will not be visible in the output. A name that sounds like a common word usually is not one.

5. Use real typeface outlines, not hand-rolled letterforms

Hand-drawn geometric letters look like a template and carry bugs. Bake outlines from a real face with SKILLS_DIR/scripts/outline.py and freeze them as path data: correct contrast and kerning, no webfont request, no flash of fallback type.

The trade: baked outlines fix the string. If the wordmark text might ever be localised or edited, say so at the time — it has to stay live text.

6. Decide colour by comparison, not theory

Put candidate palettes side by side in the sheet and look. Two colours that are defensible individually can fight when adjacent — near-complementary pairs especially. The fix is usually not a different hue but removing one from the pairing.

7. The user picks, at every gate

Never advance a round on your own taste. Present, recommend with reasons, and wait. Say plainly which candidates you would cut and why — an opinion is useful, a decision is not yours.

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Anti-patterns

Smell	What it actually means
Every concept shares one skeleton	You produced one concept, N times. Go do the reference study
All strokes, uniform weight	The generated default. Try solid fills, real type, or no mark at all
A mark for its own sake	Plenty of strong identities are type plus one colour. "No mark" is a candidate
Judging from the SVG source	You have not seen it. Build the sheet
A concept that needs its name explained	If it needs explaining it is not reading. The 16px column is the test

Tooling

Need	Command
Contact sheet + local server	node SKILLS_DIR/scripts/gallery.mjs <dir> [--port N] [--title T] [--no-serve]
Bake typeface outlines to paths	uv run --with fonttools --with uharfbuzz python SKILLS_DIR/scripts/outline.py

outline.py reads a JSON job list on stdin and writes JSON on stdout. Source faces come from LOGO_FONT_DIR (default .fonts), or a job may name an absolute path. See ship.md for the job shape and the traps.