oculus: sigils from first principles

a mark you can redraw from memory with a compass and a straightedge is a mark that survives every format war. that is the whole thesis of oculus.

the constraint

the generator accepts exactly three primitives: circle, line, regular polygon. no bezier freehand, no gradients in the core. if the sigil cannot be constructed, it cannot be emitted:

$ oculus gen --frame hex --eye vesica --iris 38 --pupil 11 > mark.svg

the eye in my own mark is a vesica piscis — two arcs, radius equal to the width, centers on each other’s circumference. the oldest construction in the book. euclid opens with it.

scale is a property, not an export

a good mark degrades in steps, not smears. at 16px the hexagon goes; at 32px the dashed ring goes; the eye and pupil survive to the end. oculus encodes this as detail levels, so the favicon and the hero image are the same construction, truncated.

identity that scales down honestly scales up honestly.