It began as a sketch: an X, an O, and five rounded pills hanging under them, shortest at the edges and longest in the middle. Read one way it is a face with a grin. Read another it is a level meter, which suits a studio that makes instruments. The mark had to be both at once, and quiet enough to sit in a browser tab.
Every version is drawn from numbers in one small generator, never by hand. The O sets the size and the X answers it, drawn a little shorter and a little wider, because a circle reads smaller than the corners of an X. The O's counter is never allowed to close. The mouth is exactly as wide as the eyes, with its air shared evenly, and the grin falls on one curve rather than five chosen lengths. Five directions became two, Heavy and Head, and Head became the mark: the face knocked out of a squircle plate, with a line version drawn at the face's own weight.
Then it became a system. The eyes hold still while the face changes, so the mark has expressions: home, listening, a blink, pleased, thinking, and off, for a 404. The mouth can play as a live meter and the O can blink, in a plain SVG with no script.
The mark itself stays ink. To see how far it could bend, I wrote six WebGL treatments, each fed the same head drawn live every frame: a fluorescent display with its filaments and ghost segments, an amber tube, a halftone in one blue ink, one-bit dither, a two-colour riso print, and ink bleeding into paper. They were recorded frame by frame at 4K on an exact clock and cut into one loop.
