BRAND
Designing the Strata Mark
Why a small studio needs a real mark
For a long time our logo was whatever the last page happened to render — a placeholder glyph at one size in the header, another in the footer, a third in the favicon. Nobody complained, because nobody expects a small studio to have a brand system. That's exactly why it's worth having one: it's a cheap, visible signal that we finish things.
The Strata emblem
The mark is three rounded bars, each offset one step to the right — strata, layers laid down over time. That's the most honest picture of how this studio works: no single launch, no big bang, just products deposited one at a time, each resting on the one before it. The offset gives the mark a direction — it climbs — without needing an arrow or a swoosh.
Geometrically it is deliberately simple: three rectangles with a consistent radius, a fixed step, drawn in a single color. It survives at 16 pixels in a browser tab and at full width on a share card, and it needs no gradient to feel finished.
The wordmark
The wordmark sets Zalize in a single medium weight, converted to outlines so it renders identically everywhere — no font loading, no fallback flash, no drift between platforms. Initial capital, not all-caps: we write Zalize the way you'd say it, not the way a badge would shout it.
The system around it
A mark alone isn't a brand. The same release shipped the full favicon set at every required size, an Open Graph card so links to the site unfurl properly in chats and feeds, an email header, per-product lockups for the twelve products, and a clear-space rule so future pages can't crowd the mark. All of it lives in the repository next to the code, versioned like the code.
None of this is glamorous. That's the point — a brand system is one of those things that is invisible when done and loud when skipped. We'd rather it be invisible.
Written by the Zalize studio
-- zalize.com