Photograph real work, draw icons from IBM Carbon, and check every image a site serves

Context and Problem Statement

No imagery exists as a brand decision. akribis.info serves 101 JPEGs and no WebP or AVIF, uses no image pipeline, weighs 35 MB in public/, and plays a hero video linked from a manufacturer’s media server. akiot.es imports one icon library and the other sites draw their own inline icons at five stroke widths. Its anti-brief already refuses stock people, futuristic renders and abstract visuals, but nothing says what to show instead or how to check it. What does AKRIBIS photograph and how, which icons does it use, how are diagrams drawn, and what can a build verify?

Decision Drivers

Criteria 1 (trust: images show what is real), 2 (one family), 3 (register), 4 (accessibility: text contrast proven; icons named), 8 (open licences) and 9 (generated and tested) of ADR-0009; ADR-0020 (IBM Plex); ADR-0025 and ADR-0031 (the checker inside every build).

Considered Options

• Documentary photography with written rules; IBM Carbon’s icons as the one set, published as a subset by Brand; diagrams drawn with the tokens; the formats, sizes, hosts and video attributes checked on every build
• An icon set drawn for AKRIBIS from the glyph library’s geometry
• Lucide or another general-purpose open icon set
• Rules only, with no published files and no check

Decision Outcome

Proposed: the first option. brand/imagery.yaml holds the direction, published as /imagery.json; the icon subset is published at /icons/; brand/standards.yaml holds the checks (media).

• Photography. It shows instruments at work in real installations, the laboratory and its procedures, field work with people doing the task (a face is optional), and the region’s industry. Light and colour stay true: no overlays, duotones, filters or vignettes. Crops use three ratios, 16:9, 3:2 and 1:1. Text never sits on a photograph, because its contrast cannot be proven there (criterion 4). It goes beside or below, on a token ground. AKRIBIS never uses posed stock people, never presents a stock person as a client, an employee or a testimonial, and never uses futuristic renders, abstract stand-ins or a manufacturer’s lifestyle imagery as its own. Own photography comes first. A manufacturer’s image needs written permission and a credit. Every image is recorded with its source, licence, credit, date and, for a recognisable person, consent or the licence that covers it.

• Sources, in order. A picture comes from the first tier that can show what is needed.

  1. Own photography: commissioned per unit, or taken by the team with a shot list and a consent form.
  2. The manufacturer’s media library, under the distribution agreement. Vaisala opens a partner media bank on MediaValet, the service the video akribis.info links today is served from.
  3. Open institutional archives by subject, credited and never implying endorsement: NIST for metrology, NOAA and NASA for weather, climate and remote measurement, USGS for water and environment, the CDC Public Health Image Library for laboratories and health (each item says whether it is public domain), the Library of Congress for history (only “no known restrictions”), and Wikimedia Commons and Europeana by each file’s licence.
  4. Licensed stock: one paid provider for the whole group, on a company account so every licence is on record. Shutterstock already holds content and is the natural candidate. Unsplash and Pexels only for scenes without recognisable people, brands or artworks, because their licences warrant nothing about what the photograph shows.
  5. Generated, under the rule below.

  Every image is downloaded and hosted by AKRIBIS, never hotlinked. imagery.json records each source’s use, terms and credit line; the terms of the image itself always decide.

• Generated images, only when absolutely necessary: when nothing real can show what is needed, and never of people. They are never presented as a photograph of real work, a real place, real equipment or a real client, and never used in a case, a datasheet or a certificate. They are recorded as generated, with the tool and the date, and marked in their alternative text or caption. Three questions judge a picture: does it show something AKRIBIS does, is it true, and does it stand apart from the text?

• Product shots. Cut out on white or on the band, at a three-quarter view lit from the top left across the family, with a contact shadow only, filling 70 to 80 % of a 1:1 frame.

• Icons: IBM Carbon. Carbon’s icons were drawn by IBM to accompany IBM Plex (ADR-0020) on a 32 px grid. They are licensed Apache-2.0, cover the domains the units work in (temperature, humidity, pressure, calibration, sensors, IoT, models, policy), and are maintained. Drawing a set would cost months for a result that could not match the type as closely. A general set such as Lucide is drawn for software interfaces, with rounded strokes, not for an instruments maker. Brand pins version 11.89.0. The build publishes a curated subset of 62 icons, each optimised and filled with currentColor, with the licence beside them, and refuses IBM product icons, logos and any drawing that is not single-colour. @akribis/site gains an Icon component at 16, 20, 24 or 32 px. An icon is decorative (aria-hidden) unless it has a label, and it is never the only carrier of an action. Each unit’s verb has its icon: meter, microscope, snowflake, calibrate, certificate, policy, tools, model, IoT platform. A site that needs another icon asks Brand to add it to the list; it never mixes in another set.

• Diagrams. SVG drawn with the tokens: 1 px and 2 px lines in ink and neutrals, a unit’s colour only to identify it, the spectrum only for AKRIBIS One. They are flat. Labels are real text in Plex in the page’s language, and arrows come from the icon set. Each diagram has an accessible title and description. There is no illustration.

• Video. AKRIBIS hosts its video, on the site or on the company’s Cloudflare Stream, never linked from a manufacturer. Sound never plays by itself. An automatic loop is muted, has a poster and playsinline, and stops under reduced motion. All speech is subtitled in the three languages. Openings, closings and titles are the Video topic’s (4.8).

• The check. Four rules join the checker. media-host: images and video come only from the site, Brand or the company’s video service. img-format: a raster image is served as AVIF or WebP, which astro:assets produces; JPEG and PNG are allowed only as a <picture> fallback, and Brand’s published marks and icons are exempt. img-size: no image the site serves weighs more than 300 kB. video: every video has a poster, and an autoplaying one is muted and playsinline. The rule found this site’s own colour study sheets served as PNG; the build now writes them as lossless WebP as well, at a third of the size, and the pages serve those.

Consequences

• Good, because every site draws from one set of icons that matches its type, and a manufacturer’s hotlinked video or a 2 MB JPEG fails the build instead of shipping.
• Good, because the photographic rules say what to show, not only what to avoid, and give a photographer a brief.
• Bad, because there is no own photography yet. The rules are a brief for a shoot per unit; until then sites draw on the next tiers, each image recorded with its terms. Today 61 of akribis.info’s photographs are manufacturers’ images and none records its source.
• What the checker cannot see (whether a photograph is real, its rights, text over an image set in CSS) stays a review item, judged by the three questions.
• Open: the shoots and the library that keeps them with their rights; putting the shared drive in order after the rebrand; the paid stock provider and its account; partner access to each manufacturer’s media library; where each site’s image register lives; whether the ring and the orbits animate (2.2); the unit motifs (2.6).

Confirmed by Demian Montes de Oca on 2026-10-06: the rule for generated images. The sources are a recommendation; the ones named on 2026-10-06 were examples of what has been used, not a choice. The record stays proposed for the rest until it is ratified.