Nouns are pictures. Verbs are words.

An icon is a drawing of a thing. We never draw an action. Save, delete, search, open: those are words, set in Computer Modern, and they always will be. The crayon only comes out for things that exist.

Two registers

Marks · what we say

→←✓×+−·§¶…&№

Every glyph in a control comes from the text face. A button says Save. A link says Open →. A done row says ✓. Nothing in the interface is a pictogram.

Drawings · what exists

Things from the arms, drawn by the same hand. They name offerings, people, and provenance. They sit beside text; they never replace it.

The grammar of a drawing

I.One shape, two strokes. A drawing is a single closed outline plus at most two extra lines. If it needs a third, it is two drawings.
II.Ink first, crayon after. Outline in ink at a tenth of the box (4 units on 48). Then the color, offset a little, past the line. A four-year-old does not stay inside.
III.One crayon per thing. Each drawing owns one color from the box. Toast is orange, the toaster is grey; they are two things, so the toaster gets two.
IV.Small hands shake more. The wobble is a fixed distance, not a proportion. At 24px the line trembles; at 240px it is nearly steady. Never draw a “clean” version for small sizes.
V.The animals are not icons. Horse and bear are supporters. They appear in the arms and in drawings of 240px or more. Below that, the object stands for the person.
VI.No verbs. Not even a pencil for edit. If you are tempted, write the word.

200 · animals allowed from 240

The set, and what each one is

staff

Gustavo · Gautstafr, staff of the Goths. The thing you lean on. Internal tooling.

spear

Rosser · hrōd-gēr, famous spear. The thing you throw. Bespoke builds sent out.

stone

Pedro · Petros, rock. The thing you build on. Products companies form on.

roomba

Scoz’s appliance. Paired with the horse: the one who breaks things in. Provenance mark for Gustavo.

thermostat

McIntosh’s appliance. Sits on the tower; sets the temperature for everyone. Provenance mark for Rosser.

toaster

Garcia’s appliance. Paired with the bear. Provenance mark for Pedro.

crown

Mac an Toisich, son of the chief. Used once: over the shield. Never on a person or a plan.

shield

The company itself. Stands for SMG where the full arms will not fit.

sun

Every child puts one in the corner. Ours means: this is finished and it shipped.

Presenting an idea

Diagrams are drawn, so they follow the drawing rules. Things are organic blobs, one crayon each, labelled in handwriting. Relations are dotted lines: a crayon tapped along the paper, with a small open arrowhead where it matters. No boxes, no straight rules, no grid. The claim underneath is set in type.

A client only ever asks for one of three things. The words underneath are the contract; the drawing is how we remember it.

I.Dots, not dashes. Round caps, gap of about twice the stroke. A dotted line is a relation; a solid line is an outline. Never mix.
II.Blobs, not boxes. Every container is drawn by hand once; copies are rotated or flipped, never duplicated in place.
III.Labels in handwriting inside the blob; the claim in type below the drawing. Handwriting is never the only place a fact lives.
IV.Margin notes in handwriting, in bear-brown, tilted one to three degrees. At most one per blob.

Disclosure

Everything we make is AI-assisted. We say so, every time, with a drawing of an appliance. The appliance tells you which of us was holding the crayon. Nothing is marked as human; absence of a mark means a human did it alone, and we expect that to be rare.

Scoz

Gustavo drove it

McIntosh

Rosser drove it

Garcia

Pedro drove it

I.The mark goes last: bottom-right of an artifact, end of the final paragraph of a text, last cell of a table. Size 24 inline, 28 to 32 on an artifact.
II.Two of us, two marks, side by side, in charter order: Scoz · McIntosh · Garcia. Three of us, the shield.
III.Where a drawing cannot render (plain text, email subject, commit message) the fallback is type: assisted · garcia.
IV.Hovering or focusing the mark reveals the words. The mark is never the only place the disclosure lives.
V.The mark is never removed by a client, a template, or a crop. If it does not fit, the artifact is too small.

In running text

The migration touched eleven tables and one cron job. Rollback is a single command, documented in the runbook, and was rehearsed twice on staging before we scheduled the window.

Two authors

Text-only

fix(billing): round at the line, not the total  ·  assisted · mcintosh

Next part

III. Voice. IV. Components, one per need, as needed. III. Two voices. One of them is four. →