Give every unit a profile picture: its letters inside the AKRIBIS One ring

Context and Problem Statement

The favicon tiles (ADR-0017) also served as profile pictures through their maskable layout, where everything is scaled to 77 % so that an unknown platform mask never clips it; cropped round, the letters looked small. Demian asked on 2026-10-05 for one more design, made for a known purpose rather than for any mask: a picture whose circle is the AKRIBIS One ring, with the unit’s letters inside, for profile pictures on social media. How is it drawn, how big can the letters be, what colours, and who gets one?

Decision Drivers

Criteria 2 (one coherent, expandable family) and 9 (generated and tested) of ADR-0009, and ADR-0005: every unit presents itself as “Una unidad de AKRIBIS One”.

Considered Options

Drawn side by side in brand/evidence/avatar-study.png (brand/src/study-avatar.ts), at profile and feed size, on white and on ink:

• A. White disc, the spectrum in the ring, the letters in the unit’s signature
• B. White disc, ring and letters in the unit’s signature
• C. The disc in the signature, white letters, the spectrum in the ring
• D. The disc in the signature, white letters, the ring in the teal ink
• E. The tile avatar as published, cropped round

Decision Outcome

Chosen by Demian on 2026-10-05: A, half a stroke of air between the letters and the ring, and the parent stays out. Data in brand/marks/icons.yaml (avatar); code in brand/src/avatar.ts; files per brand at /marks/<id>/<id>-avatar.svg and <id>-avatar-{400,800,1200}.png.

• What it means. The endorsement drawn: the unit takes the place of One’s dot, at the centre of One’s ring. The spectrum says One; the letters, in the unit’s signature, say the unit. B lost One from the ring; C merged the ring with the disc where the hue coincided; D said One quietly, vanished on dark pages and could not draw One itself.

• Who. The nine units, and AKRIBIS One as the ring with its dot, the mark as it is. Not the parent: the company is neither the offer nor a unit of it (brand-architecture.md), so “akribis group” inside the One ring would say the wrong thing. The parent keeps the tile.

• The ring keeps its proportions (ADR-0016) and sits 4 % inside the square’s edge, so a platform’s circle crop lands outside it and a rounded-square crop keeps it whole.

• The letters are fitted by their ink, the smallest circle around the outlines, to the inner disc with half a stroke of air. Fitting ink rather than the letter box gains a fifth in size and centres the pair where the eye wants it (the box centre sits high because of the k’s ascender). One scale for all, set by the widest pair (“s4”), so every unit’s letters share one x-height: 34 % of the square, against 29 % on the tile. Touching the ring would give 38 % and was declined; “sf” alone could grow half again, at the cost of the shared x-height.

• The ground is opaque: platforms flatten transparency unpredictably.

  Amendment, 2026-10-05. Seen on the page, the white ground looked odd: the disc vanished into a white page and the ring floated. Demian asked for a shade. The ground is now the brand’s lightest tint, step 50 of its ramp (the roles’ soft surface; One on the AKRIBIS ramp). It is the only tint on which every unit’s letters keep the 3:1 floor for graphics (AKURALAB 3.03; on step 100 it would fall to 2.78, on 200 to 2.38). The step is one field, avatar.ground in brand/marks/icons.yaml, and the build asserts the floor.

• Delivery. SVG master and PNG at 400 (LinkedIn, X), 800 (YouTube, WhatsApp) and 1200. Shown on the Social media topic; the favicon tile is never used as a profile picture.

Consequences

• Good, because the endorsement line now has a graphic form that every network can show, generated from the same ring, the same letters and the same colours as everything else.
• Good, because a new unit gets its picture from its two letters and its hue.
• On a feed the two teals (AKRIBIS, AKURALAB) are told apart by letter colour alone; the name beside the picture carries the rest.
• Resolves the social-media part of the open endorsement item on the AKRIBIS One topic; the endorsement in print and on the sites remains open.

Superseded, 2026-10-05. Seen on the page in both grounds, Demian found the ring distracting as a frame. ADR-0019 makes the full-bleed tile the profile picture instead, keeping from this record the one thing that produced the gain: fitting the letters by their ink to the circle. The candidates stay in brand/evidence/avatar-study.png as evidence; the endorsement item on the AKRIBIS One topic is open again.