Rank the criteria every brand decision is judged against

Context and Problem Statement

Every decision record needs to say why. Against what, and in what order when two criteria pull in opposite directions? The 0.2 draft proposed ten criteria that were never agreed. On 3 Oct 2026 Demian set the direction: coherence above all, expansion never blocked, recognition kept only where it exists (AKRIBIS teal, AKRIMET orange, SOLFARMA blue, the letterforms).

Decision Outcome

The criteria, in order. A lower number wins a conflict.

1. Trust of a regulated buyer. Industrial, pharmaceutical and regulated customers must be able to rely on what they see: every claim traceable, every document auditable.
2. One coherent, expandable family. Ten members (nine units and AKRIBIS One) read as one company and can be told apart; an eleventh can join without breaking the system.
3. Register. A precise scientific-instruments maker; never a software start-up, never a consumer brand.
4. Accessibility. WCAG 2.2 AA is the floor on every surface; APCA is reported and decides when the two disagree in a way that matters.
5. Works beyond the screen. Print, Office and documents are first-class: CMYK and Pantone references, installable fonts, templates.
6. Recognition. What people already recognise changes by the smallest amount that the criteria above require: the letterforms; AKRIBIS’s teal; AKRIMET’s orange; SOLFARMA’s blue, more loosely.
7. Three languages. Spanish (es-AR), Portuguese and English, each a first-class surface; number and date formats per language.
8. Open licences. Typefaces and tools that every unit and every site may use without a per-seat cost.
9. Generated and tested. Values come from code and data in this repository; a rule that cannot be checked in the build is not a rule yet.

Consequences

• Good, because every record from here on cites criteria by number.
• Neutral, because recognition sits sixth: a colour may move for coherence, a letterform may not, since letterforms are what the first two criteria rest on.

Ratified by Demian Montes de Oca on 2026-10-03.