Kitsoki logo — the Mesa Sun
Name
Kitsoki (kit-soh-kee) is a Hopi word for a contemporary settlement — a collection of houses, ceremonial chambers, and public plazas arranged into one living whole. The metaphor fits a conversational workflow engine that hosts many surfaces (TUI, daemon, Jira, Bitbucket) as connected rooms under one architecture.
The Chacoan ancestors of today's Pueblo peoples practiced astronomy at a level modern archaeologists still find striking:
- Great houses at Chaco Canyon are oriented to the cardinal directions and to the 18.6-year lunar standstill cycle.
- The Sun Dagger on Fajada Butte uses three rock slabs to cast light-and-shadow markers onto a spiral petroglyph at the solstices and equinoxes.
- The Great North Road runs almost exactly due north from Chaco for about sixty kilometers across broken terrain.
The name is a small acknowledgment of serious pre-Columbian scientific and architectural work encoded into the built landscape.
Sources for the term and the architectural vocabulary it sits in:
- Whiteley, Peter. Chacoan Kinship. American Museum of Natural History.
- Kuwanwisiwma, Leigh J., T. J. Ferguson, and Chip Colwell, eds. (2018). Footprints of Hopi History: Hopihiniwtiput Kukveni'at. University of Arizona Press.
Mark
The Kitsoki mark is the Mesa Sun: a desert sun rising over a stepped, terraced dwelling. It draws on the architecture of Hopi / Ancestral Puebloan cliff-dwelling settlements — flat-topped mesas, terraced pueblos, and a single doorway — rendered as abstract geometry rather than literal depiction.
On the theme. The mark deliberately stays with architecture and light — terraces, a doorway, a sun with evenly-fanned rays. It does not use kachina figures, ceremonial symbols, or any sacred imagery, which carry real cultural weight and are not ours to genericize. Keep future variations on the same respectful side of that line.
The mark
| <img src="assets/mesa-sun.svg" width="120" alt="Mesa Sun full mark"> | Full mark. The primary logo. A sun with five rays evenly fanned at 45° across the upper half, above a two-tier terraced dwelling with a doorway. Use at 32 px and above. |
Anatomy
- Five rays, even 45° spacing. Rays sit at 0°, 45°, 90°, 135° and 180° around the sun's centre — perfectly symmetric, with the two outermost rays horizontal. All rays share one inner and outer radius, so they read as a clean fan, not a scatter.
- Terraced dwelling. A raised central block (the "second floor") steps down to lower wings, sitting on a darker ground band — the stepped silhouette of a cliff settlement.
- Doorway. A single dark opening centres the building (full mark only).
- Clear gap. Sun and building never touch; the negative space between them is part of the mark.
Variations
Simplified glyph — for ≤ 24 px
<img src="assets/mesa-sun-simple.svg" width="72" alt="Simplified Mesa Sun">
Below ~24 px the full mark's doorway and thin rays collapse into noise. The simplified glyph is built for small sizes:
- doorway dropped, single-tier-to-wings building with a taller central block,
- thicker rays and strokes so the shapes survive downsampling,
- still the full five-ray fan for brand consistency.
Use it for favicons, small browser-tab icons, and anywhere the mark renders at 16–24 px.
Monochrome — single-colour / template icon
<img src="assets/mesa-sun-mono.svg" width="72" alt="Monochrome Mesa Sun">
A solid single-colour silhouette that inherits currentColor, with no internal cut-outs so it never fills in at small sizes. Drop it in as a template/mask icon and let the host tint it for theme colour and hover/selected states. Intended for:
- VS Code activity-bar icons (grey when idle, accent when active),
- menu-bar / system-tray template images,
- tool-window tabs and any monochrome chrome.
Light variant — for dark / coloured tiles
<img src="assets/mesa-sun-light.svg" width="72" alt="Light Mesa Sun" style="background:#7d2e1c;border-radius:8px">
A re-coloured full mark (sand sun, lighter building) for use on dark or clay-coloured app-icon tiles where the default rust building would disappear.
In context
The mark across the forms a logo actually ships in — a light app bar with the wordmark, window / browser-tab chrome, and a circular avatar.
| <img src="assets/context-appbar.svg" width="240" alt="Kitsoki wordmark on a light app bar"> | App bar / wordmark. Full mark beside "kits<b>oki</b>" — lowercase humanist sans, the trailing oki set in Clay. For paper / sand surfaces. The README header uses the same lockup on transparent (mesa-sun-wordmark.svg). |
| <img src="assets/context-tab.svg" width="240" alt="Kitsoki in window / browser-tab chrome"> | Window / tab chrome. Simplified glyph + label on a dark title bar — the favicon-scale placement. |
| <img src="assets/mesa-sun-avatar.svg" width="80" alt="Kitsoki circular avatar"> | Avatar. Full mark centred on a paper disc inside an Adobe ring — for profile / identity spots. |
Palette
| Role | Name | Hex |
|---|---|---|
| Sun | Gold | #e0a23a |
| Building | Clay | #a8492b |
| Building (light tier / accents) | Adobe | #c97b4a |
| Ground / shadow | Rust | #7d2e1c |
| Doorway / deep shadow | Mesa shadow | #3a2418 |
| Light fields / reversed mark | Sand / Paper | #e8d6b3 / #f0e3c8 |
| Optional cool accent | Turquoise | #3aa3a0 |
Backgrounds the mark is tuned for: paper #f6efe2, sand #e8d6b3, dark#1c140d, desert sky #2b4a6f.
Usage guidance
Sizing
- ≥ 32 px → full mark (
mesa-sun.svg). - ≤ 24 px → simplified glyph (
mesa-sun-simple.svg). - Any monochrome chrome → mono glyph (
mesa-sun-mono.svg).
Clear space. Keep padding of at least the sun's radius around the mark. On rounded app-icon tiles, ~10 % padding reads better than the platform-max safe area — don't shrink the mark to float in the middle of the tile.
Backgrounds. Use the default mark on light/sand surfaces; use the light variant on dark or clay tiles; use the mono glyph wherever the host supplies the colour.
Wordmark. Pair the mark with "kitsoki" set lowercase in a humanist sans, or small-caps with extra letter-spacing — the trailing oki in Clay. The prebuilt lockup is mesa-sun-wordmark.svg (transparent). The mark also stands alone.
Don't
- Don't re-space the rays unevenly or drop them to fewer than five (use the prebuilt simplified glyph instead of hand-trimming).
- Don't let the sun touch or overlap the building.
- Don't recolour outside the palette or add gradients/shadows to the glyph itself.
- Don't add kachina, ceremonial, or other sacred Puebloan imagery.
- Don't stretch — scale uniformly.
Files
All assets live in assets/:
| File | Use |
|---|---|
mesa-sun.svg | Primary full mark (≥ 32 px) |
mesa-sun-simple.svg | Simplified glyph (≤ 24 px, favicons) |
mesa-sun-mono.svg | Monochrome / template icon (currentColor) |
mesa-sun-light.svg | Full mark recoloured for dark/clay tiles |
mesa-sun-avatar.svg | Full mark on a paper disc with an Adobe ring (avatars / profile spots) |
mesa-sun-wordmark.svg | Mark + "kitsoki" lockup, transparent (README header) |
context-appbar.svg | Wordmark on a light app bar ("in context" mock) |
context-tab.svg | "In context" mock — glyph + label in window / tab chrome |
The exploratory set — all ten original concepts and an interactive size/variation preview — lives under .artifacts/kitsoki-logos/ (not committed).