Round one. Two questions to settle by eye: whether the arrow earns its place, and — the one that actually matters — whether the mark keeps fixed colors or restyles per theme.
This is a faithful rebuild, not the original file. The original was written and shown to
Chris on 2026-08-01, then overwritten in place by round two later the same session.
PROOFS/ is gitignored, so no copy survived anywhere — not git, not the archives, not
the trash. It is gone.
Rebuilt the same day from the session record by the author, with the content and both recommendations reproduced as they stood — including the one that turned out to be wrong. That is the point of keeping it: round two overturned this page's central recommendation with measurements, and a case study that shows only the corrected answer hides the part worth showing.
What differs from the original: this banner, and the two "what happened next" notes marked in red. Nothing else was changed, softened or improved with hindsight.
The guide cover carries a 34px accent square with an = in it. The
= is not a glyph and not an SVG — it is an empty box whose only visible feature is
border-bottom: 5px double. CSS draws a double border as two lines with a gap,
and that pair is the equals sign. Cheap, sharp at any DPI, and it scales by two numbers.
Round two caught it: the guide's mark is a green plate with a white =, and this page shows a cream plate with a green one throughout. Measured later against every theme, the guide's actual green mark fails 6 of 10 at 2.19–3.39:1 — it was designed against the guide's single white page, while the app has twenty surfaces and sixteen are dark. The cream plate shown here scores 9.95–19.13:1. The error produced the better answer, which is luck, not method.
At 38px it is legible and it does say growth. At 26px — the phone mark — it stops being
an arrow and becomes a smudge over the rules, which is where a lot of people will meet the app
first. It also argues against the idea: = means the ledger balances, and an arrow
pointing up means the number goes up. A ledger that balances is the honest claim; a ledger
that always rises is a different product. But this is your call and your "maybe" — look at it at
both sizes.
Outcome: Chris dropped it — "No arrow in the logo - too busy."
Themed (top block): the mark pulls --side-mark-bg /
--side-mark-ink, exactly as the ₪ does today. Always harmonious, never quite a
logo — and every portfolio screenshot shows a different mark.
Fixed: the guide's own green-on-cream everywhere, regardless of theme.
The backlog said "leaning fixed, for brand consistency with the printed guide" — and looking at it, I think that is wrong, for one concrete reason. Scroll to Matrix, Terminal and Bumblebee in the fixed block. A cream-and-green tile on pure black, or on Bumblebee's yellow, does not read as brand discipline; it reads as an asset someone forgot to restyle. Fixed color works when a mark sits on neutral chrome — and this one sits on a sidebar that is deliberately, loudly colored in ten different ways. Meanwhile the shape is what carries recognition, and the shape is identical in both blocks. You get the guide's mark either way; themed just also gets contrast that works.
Chris said he was leaning uniform. Round two measured it instead of arguing, and Matrix and Terminal — two of the three named here as failures — are the two strongest cases for uniform, at 19.13:1 and 18.47:1. A cream mark on near-black is exactly what the dark themes want. Eight of ten pass comfortably; the only real failures are Gulf and Bumblebee, and they fail for one shared reason — both have light sidebars — which is a rule rather than a pile of exceptions, and is what made uniform viable.
The lesson, stated plainly: this page argued from a worry and called it a finding. Every number that settled it was available before the page was written.
A double border needs enough width to draw two lines and a gap. Squeeze it
and the browser collapses it to a single line — the = silently becomes a –.
Sizes below are what the app would use; the last two are past the floor and are here to show the
failure.
So 3px is the hard floor and the phone's 4px has exactly one pixel of headroom.
Worth a comment in the CSS, because the failure is silent and nothing in a syntax gate or a unit test
can see it — the same class of thing as the charts. This one held up:
it became tests/logo-test.mjs, which pins every site above the floor.
| Where | Today | Becomes |
|---|---|---|
.brand-mark | 38px rounded tile, ₪ | 38px square, 18×9 rule, 5px double |
.topbar-mark | 26px rounded tile, ₪ | 26px square, 12×6 rule, 4px double |
| wizard rail | shares .brand-mark | inherits — no separate change |
| colors | --side-mark-bg/ink | unchanged if themed — the tokens already exist in all ten |
There are four, not three. .boot-mark — the splash screen — is in static
markup rather than JS-generated markup, so the sweep that produced this table did not see it. It is
also the first thing anyone sees on opening the app.