Brand Name Alternatives — Exploration#

v0.14 — 2026-08-04 | Status: exploratory, not ratified · Owner: EC *v0.14: EC asked for an actual register pass on the starter field rather than web signals — the right call, since web signals are what got Weft wrong. Findings: Biga has three US records and all three are dead, with Class 9/42 never touched — the cleanest register position in the whole exploration. Levain is crowded but entirely in Classes 30/35 (food and retail), and Levain Bakery is actively prosecuting a Canadian application right now, which matters for an Ontario entity. The structural finding: these words are generic inside baking, so nobody can own them there — and applied to context infrastructure they become arbitrary marks, the strongest registrable tier. On trademark grounds the ranking inverts: Biga leads, Levain trails. Still not a clearance search — see the methodology caveat.* v0.13 — 2026-08-04 | Status: exploratory, not ratified · Owner: EC v0.13: EC proposed sugar / flour ("ingredients for delicious stuff"). Sugar closes (SugarCRM → SugarAI, April 2026); flour fails on metaphor before collisions matter. But the field splits like the fire field did, and the good half is the preferment — the portion held back and fed forward so no bake starts from nothing. Levain, Poolish, and Biga all come back with nothing in tech, making this the most open field since the loom; Sourdough, logged in v0.6 as "exactly the product" and shelved as too whimsical, is back on the table under the warmth thesis. Two EC proposals in a row have now landed on the right field and the wrong half of it, which produced framework criterion 7: does the object survive the handoff? v0.12 — 2026-07-31 | Status: exploratory, not ratified · Owner: EC *v0.12: EC proposed Opal ("I love the fire") — closed fatally (Google Opal, the Labs AI mini-app builder, now in Gemini and 160+ countries). But it opens a new cluster, the carried fire, and a distinction worth keeping: opal's play-of-colour fire is an anti-metaphor for a custody brand (the display changes with the viewer; Relay promises it doesn't), while the carried fire — the ember taken to light the next hearth, the fire banked overnight so nobody relights from zero — is one of the closest metaphor matches in the whole exercise. Ember and Hearth are also taken by AI companies; Girasol (an opal variety, and open on a first pass) is the field's one live outlier.* v0.11 — 2026-07-31 | Status: exploratory, not ratified · Owner: EC v0.11: sweep of the remaining unchecked/verify-tier names. Packet, Retriever, Understudy close (packet.ai GPU cloud + PacketAI; Retriever AI browser agent + funded Korean namesake; understudy-ai — a live open-source computer-operating agent). Segno and Symbolon downgrade to neighbors (the Python QR-code library; Symbolon AG coaching). Attacca, Selvedge, Changeover re-verified clean. The full-field survivors are now: Ferry ◐, Passit ◐, Changeover ○, Attacca ○, Selvedge ○ — see the new survivors board, brand/naming-survivors.html. v0.10: Passit checked (Cluster B) — open with real cautions, not closed: no AI-agent-tooling collision, but passit.io (an open-source zero-knowledge password manager) shares Relay's custody/trust mental model, and passit.ca holds a registered ® on the bare word in a different class. Recommend the same counsel-check tier as Ferry. v0.9: deeper pass on everything still standing after Weft fell — Strand closes (AWS's Strands Agents SDK: 16.7M downloads/month, production use at Smartsheet/Swisscom/Jit, Anthropic itself listed as a contributor), Portage worsens to closed (two live AI product companies — portage.ai, portage.so — on top of the Canadian crowding already on record), Belay worsens to closed (a fourth live "Belay" — belay.ai, an AI climbing-analytics startup — on top of the two enterprise companies and a Python hardware library already found). Ferry is the only one of EC's original five left standing, and only in the counsel-dependent tier it was already in. See "Priority five" and "The drawn line," below. v0.8: Weft closes. letsweft.com — a live, priced AI-first Scrumban task manager built on MCP specifically for Claude Code/Cursor/Codex users — is the sharpest collision found in the whole exercise: same buyer, same protocol, same category as Relay. See "Priority five," below — this removes the last clean pick from EC's original five; none of the five clear outright now. v0.7 — 2026-07-30 | Status: exploratory, not ratified · Owner: EC v0.7: EC proposals Needle, Tooly, Trust, and Transparency checked and closed — see "Checked: Needle" under the drawn-line/weave section (reinforces, doesn't reopen, that field's brand-language-not-naming-lane verdict), "Checked: Tooly" under the obtuse lane (closed on genericness + the diminutive-lane guidance already on record), and "Also checked (bare words)" under Cluster E (Trust, Transparency — closes the cluster's own synthesis harder than it was already closed). v0.6: EC priority five (Weft · Portage · Belay · Ferry · Seurat) checked for TM signals — see "Priority five" section; wider riff pass added; the naming map (brand/naming-map.html) becomes the main entry page. v0.2 added Cluster E (trust vocabulary — scouted, mostly closed), the continuity/trust synthesis, and positioning-line options. v0.3 added the riff field — a wider seedbed for the eventual creative-director engagement. v0.4 added the connect-the-dots / weave investigation (EC direction). v0.5 adds the obtuse lane (incl. the Magi / MagicCTX verdict) and the visual specimen board (brand/naming-specimens.html).

Contingency exercise: if RelayCTX / "Relay" ever had to change, what's a credible evolution? Not a scheduled rebrand — a scouted landing zone so we're not starting from zero if the name ever becomes a forcing function (trademark dispute, collision, acquisition of the mark, etc).

Trigger for this doc: the volume of "Relay"-named products in adjacent spaces, plus a specific pull toward leaning harder into the baton/relay-race metaphor that's already implicit in the product (see _vocab/_VOCAB.md — verb "relay," "received," the handoff mental model).

Where we start from#

• Name: RelayCTX · legal entity Relay Context Inc.™ · domain relayctx.com
• Verb already owned: "relay" — "relay a Code," "relay it forward"
• Metaphor already live, just not literalized: context as a baton passed hand-to-hand between sessions/agents/people. The whole vocab system (Code, receive, Stream, Series) is relay-race-adjacent without naming the race.
• Mark: "Open Signal" — unboxed, currentColor, teal touch-points (see brand/relay-lockup.html)

Any alternative should either (a) keep "relay" as the verb even if the company name changes — closer to how Slack kept "channel" — or (b) replace the verb too, which is a much bigger lift across MCP tool names, API routes, and UI copy. This doc treats (a) as the default assumption unless a candidate is strong enough to justify (b).

Headline finding: don't lock onto "Baton" as a literal name#

The baton metaphor is right — the instinct to lean into it is sound, it's already latent in the product. But "Baton" as a standalone product name is already contested in exactly our category, not adjacent ones:

Four live "Baton" products, three of them literally in AI-agent/context tooling. That's not a soft collision — a formal clearance search would almost certainly kill it, and even informally it reads as "which Baton is this" on day one. Recommendation: keep the baton as a metaphor in visual identity, copy, and motion — not as the literal wordmark.

Related caution: "Handoff" is the other obvious literal choice, and it's squarely occupied by Apple's Continuity/Handoff feature (the "pick up where you left off across devices" system, extremely well-known). Not a hard trademark bar since it's a feature name not a product name, but it means the word is permanently associated with someone else's thing in the exact mental-model space we'd want to own it in.

(Caveat: this was a web pass, not a formal trademark/USPTO or domain-registrar search. Treat "clear" below as "no obvious collision found," not "cleared.")

Framework for judging a candidate#

1. Evolution, not detour — should feel like RelayCTX grew up, not like a different company. Keep some thread to relay/handoff/continuity.
2. Owns a verb — "relay a Code" works because it's a verb. A name that can't verb (or doesn't need to, if we keep "relay" as the verb per the assumption above) loses a real asset.
3. Distinct in the AI-agent-tooling category specifically — generic "sounds techy" words (Bridge, Conduit, Torch, Anchor, Envoy, Courier) are almost all already taken in this exact space — checked below.
4. Short, spellable, one clean domain — relayctx.com works because CTX reads instantly to this audience. A new name needs the same property.
5. Survives translation into the mark — Open Signal (the current mark) is abstract enough to survive a name change if we want it to; a name that fights the existing visual system is a bigger lift.
6. Doesn't inherit baggage — Anchor is a live cautionary tale: Spotify retired the Anchor podcasting brand partly because the name had absorbed a reputation (abandoned shows, piracy) it didn't originally have. Worth a sentiment check on any finalist, not just a collision check.
7. Does the object survive the handoff? (added 2026-08-04, after the Opal and baking passes both turned on it.) Every metaphor has an object at its centre. Ask one question of it: when the pass happens, does this thing persist, or is it consumed? Relay's promise is that the context arrives intact — so a metaphor whose object is used up, transformed, or altered in transit is an anti-metaphor, no matter how attractive it is. This is not a collision test; a name can clear every registry and still fail here. It has now caught two EC proposals, and in both cases the neighbouring object in the same field passed cleanly:

The pattern is worth stating plainly because it keeps recurring: EC's proposals have been landing on the right fields and the wrong half of them. The instinct is sound; the discipline is asking which half is load-bearing.

Candidate clusters#

A. Relay-race vocabulary, one level more specific than "baton"#

The exchange itself — not the object — is the least colonized part of the metaphor.

• Changeover ○ (re-verified 2026-07-31 — still no software company or AI product on the name) — the literal track & field term for the baton exchange. Reads clean, verbs okay ("changeover to Erik"). Light collision only in manufacturing/ops-AI ("line changeover" tooling) — different enough category. The original shortlist #1, and one of the last names standing after the 07-30/07-31 attrition; its open question was never clearance, it's register (reads industrial under the warmth lens).
• Exchange Zone — the marked lane where the pass legally has to happen. Strong metaphor (bounded, procedural, exactly what a Code represents) but two words, "Exchange" alone is heavily used in fintech/crypto.
• Leadoff / Anchor leg — leg-of-the-race terms. "Anchor" flagged above (Spotify baggage + generic-word crowding). Leadoff underused but reads sports-obscure outside a US audience.

B. Evolve "Relay" without leaving it#

Lowest-disruption path — keeps the verb, the vocab system, and most of the brand system intact.

• Relay Loop / Relayed / GetRelay — modifier or suffix strategy rather than a new root. Cheapest migration (SEO, muscle memory, existing integrations named relay_*), weakest signal that anything actually changed.
• Relais — French for relay, also the historical term for a horse-relay waystation (a nice literal echo of "context waystation"). Soft collision: Relais & Châteaux (hospitality) and RELIAS LLC (healthcare software) both sit in the trademark neighborhood, though neither is close in category.
• Passit ◐ (EC proposal, 2026-07-31) — checked 2026-07-31. The most literal possible translation of the verb itself: not a metaphor for handoff, the imperative is the handoff ("relay it forward" → "pass it"). Zero abstraction, which is both its appeal and its risk — see below.

No AI-agent-tooling collision found — unlike Weft/Needle/Portage/Belay, nothing here sits in Relay's actual category. Standing: open with real cautions, not closed. The registered ® (different class, so navigable, but real) and the security/custody mental-model overlap with passit.io are worth a genuine counsel look before this goes further, same tier as Ferry. One more caution, register rather than collision: "Passit" reads as an instruction, not a proper noun — worth checking against "Relay It" (already a live button label in the product) so the two don't talk over each other in the same UI.

C. Continuity metaphor, softer than a race#

Trades the literal sport image for the underlying promise (nothing gets dropped).

• Throughline / Carryover / Threadline — all three are open-feeling, none came back with a direct AI-tooling hit in a quick pass. Softer, less visually punchy than baton/changeover — would need the mark to carry more of the energy.
• Continuum — worth noting as a precedent, not a pick: Anaconda started life as Continuum Analytics and rebranded in 2017 because the abstract name wasn't memorable enough once the product had real users. Good case study for "don't just trade a concrete name for a more abstract one."

D. Passing/carrying motion, non-race#

• Ferry — carries something across a gap, on a schedule, reliably. Distinct from the current field, no AI-tooling collision found in this pass, and it verbs naturally ("ferry your context over"). Common-enough word that a clean domain is the real risk, not the trademark.

E. Trust vocabulary — scouted and mostly closed#

EC flagged continuity + trust as the two load-bearing brand ideas (they already are: "continuity" is a locked vocab word, and trust is the Sovereign Relay / data-residency / user-owned-context thread). So the trust wordfield was scouted as a naming cluster. Finding: it is the most colonized space checked so far — worse than the baton field — because "trust" is what every identity, custody, and data-governance company claims:

Only invented/compound forms came back clean (nothing found for e.g. "Threadfast"), which is a different naming strategy (coined name) with different costs — noted, not pursued in this pass.

The synthesis this forces — name from continuity, position on trust. The two wordfields behave differently: trust words are claimed (every company that touches data claims them), continuity words are comparatively open (Cluster C — Throughline, Carryover, Threadline — returned no direct hits; Changeover and Ferry are continuity-adjacent too). And structurally, trust is the kind of claim that has to be demonstrated, not asserted — a company named "Trust-something" is asserting it; a company whose name says continuity and whose product proves custody (encryption, residency, audit, receipts) is demonstrating it. So: if a rename ever happens, the name should come from the continuity/exchange field (Clusters A/C/D), and trust should stay where it already lives — in the product's proof surfaces and the positioning language. This also retroactively explains why the existing shortlist held up: Changeover, Ferry, and Relais are all continuity-field names.

Also checked (bare words): Trust, Transparency (EC proposal, 2026-07-30)#

The cluster above checked trust-*adjacent* vocabulary (Steward, Custodian, Provenance...); it hadn't checked the literal bare words. Closing that gap only confirms the synthesis harder — these are the most purely descriptive words available for a company whose entire pitch is "prove trust through transparency," which is exactly the move Cluster E already warned against (naming the company after the claim, instead of proving the claim in the product).

Both close on the same structural point Cluster E already made, just with harder evidence this time: a $12B competitor is now literally selling "the trust layer" as its category descriptor, and Transparency International's brand equity makes "Transparency" nearly unusable regardless of category. Nothing new to reroute — this is exactly where the words already live correctly: positioning copy already uses "trusted," "custody," "sealed," "verified" (see Positioning lines, below) without trying to own them as the company name. One live caution worth carrying into copy work specifically (copy/, _vocab/): given Cyera's positioning, Relay's own copy should probably avoid the literal phrase "trust layer" to describe itself going forward — it now reads as someone else's category term, the same caution already logged for "context handoff" after the Baton AI check.

Positioning lines — continuity as promise, trust as proof#

Not taglines-for-approval — working options that show the register, for the copy/ area and the marketing site to draw from. All are name-independent (they work under RelayCTX today or any Cluster A/C/D name later), all use locked vocabulary, and all follow the Sage/Ruler read in the board brand brief: legible claim, sovereign posture, no hype.

Continuity-led (the promise):

• Context that survives the handoff.
• Nothing gets dropped between sessions.
• The work continues, whoever picks it up.

Trust-led (the proof):

• Continuity you can prove.
• Your context. Your custody. Every hop on the record.
• Trusted context — sealed on send, verified on receive.

Paired (promise + proof, the full register):

• Nothing dropped. Nothing leaked.
• Context moves. Custody holds.
• The thread holds — and you hold the thread.

Register note: continuity lines lean Sage (calm, factual, about the work); trust lines lean Ruler (custody, record, seal). The paired lines are the two-beat structure the brand can own — short declarative promise, short declarative proof. "Context moves. Custody holds." is the strongest candidate of the pass: four words, both pillars, verbs both times, no adjectives.

Shortlist to actually clear (in priority order)#

1. Changeover — closest literal descendant of the baton idea, verbs, no category collision found
2. Ferry — strong verb, no collision found, but likely the hardest domain
3. Relais — cheapest emotional migration (keeps "relay" legible), soft trademark neighbors to check
4. Keep Baton alive only as a visual/motion motif (the mark, animation, internal codenames) — not the wordmark

Not recommending: Baton (wordmark), Handoff, Anchor, Continuum, Bridge/ Conduit/Torch/Envoy/Courier, and the whole trust wordfield — Steward, Custodian, Provenance, Vouch, Lineage, Keepsake (all confirmed-crowded in this pass, listed for the record so they don't get re-proposed without the context). Trust belongs in positioning and proof surfaces, not the name — see Cluster E.

Also checked — Pigeon (EC proposal, 2026-07-22): closed on both axes. Namespace: 7+ live software products including a YC document-AI company, plus an active novelty trend of deliberately-slow carrier-pigeon messaging apps (Roost et al., TechCrunch July 2026). Register: the carrier-pigeon metaphor currently codes as whimsical-and-slow, and it's a standing joke in networking culture (RFC 1149, "IP over Avian Carriers") — fights the continuity/trust register head-on. Its one good instinct (a carrier that reliably homes to its destination) is already covered by Ferry, without the whimsy or the crowd.

Competitive note — Baton AI (getbaton.ai)#

Worth a closer look than the collision-check above gave it, because the overlap isn't just the name.

Not a product competitor. Baton AI is vertical and narrow: an AI copilot for B2B SaaS vendors' own solutions-engineering/pre-sales/implementation teams, used to auto-configure their product for their customers — spins up live demo accounts, provisions onboarding (roles, limits, dashboard filters), and has a "Copilot" that extracts context from meeting notes/docs to drive that configuration. Relay is horizontal — context continuity between AI agent sessions, tools, and people, not tied to configuring any specific downstream product. Different buyer, different job. No head-on overlap.

But the vocabulary overlap is real, and it's the sharper risk. Baton AI's own positioning uses "customer handoffs" — not just a shared word, the same conceptual territory (context flowing from one party to configure/inform the next) that Relay's entire vocab system lives in (relay, receive, the handoff mental model). Combined with the three other live "Baton" products already in AI-agent tooling (see table above), this reinforces — on category-confusion grounds, not just trademark grounds — that "Baton" is off the table as a literal name. A prospect who's seen "Baton AI" pitched around "context" + "handoff" would have real trouble telling a Baton-named Relay apart at a glance, even though the products don't compete.

Implication beyond naming: the "context handoff" framing itself is getting more contested as a category description in B2B AI tooling, which is worth keeping in mind for positioning copy generally (copy/, _vocab/), not just for a hypothetical rename.

The riff field — seeded for a creative director#

Deliberately wider and looser than the clusters above. The clusters were built to converge (find a clearable shortlist); this section exists to diverge — raw material for the eventual creative-director engagement, so that work starts from a stocked field instead of a blank page. Statuses: ○ open (spot-checked, nothing found in category), ◐ neighbors (spot-checked, soft collisions outside our category), ✕ closed (collision confirmed or fatal register problem), ? unchecked (riffed only — some ✕/? judgments below are from memory, not fresh searches; the CD pass should re-verify anything it falls in love with).

Every entry follows the same test: does the metaphor say continuity that can be trusted — a thing carried across a gap, intact, with proof?

The split token — proof artifacts (the deepest vein)#

The pre-modern world solved Relay's exact problem — how do two parties who can't see each other trust a handoff? — with objects broken in two.

• Symbolon ◐ (downgraded from ○, 2026-07-31: Symbolon AG, a Liechtenstein/Swiss AI-supported coaching firm, plus a Greek IT company, Symvolon Pliroforiki — neighbors in professional services, not in our category) — Greek σύμβολον: an object snapped in half so the parties could later verify each other by rejoining the halves. It is the root of the word "symbol." A Code is a symbolon. The single richest story found in this exercise — even if never used as a name, it belongs in brand narrative and possibly the mark language. The neighbors weaken it as a company wordmark; the feature-name lane (trust receipt / seal, per the open thread) is unaffected.
• Tally ✕ (Tally accounting, tally.so) — but the split-tally stick (a stick split lengthwise, each party keeps half, the grain proves the match) is the same story in wood; free to use as narrative.
• Tessera ◐? — Roman tessera hospitalis, the broken hospitality token; also a mosaic piece. Prior tech uses believed (Tessera Technologies → Xperi).
• Countersign ? — the sentry's exchanged watchword; a spoken Code.
• Indenture ✕ register — the matching wavy-cut document; fatal baggage.

The starter — the portion held back and fed forward (EC direction, 2026-08-04)#

EC proposed sugar / flour — "elementals to baking something, ingredients for delicious stuff." The field is better than its opening words, and it splits exactly the way the fire field did.

The ingredients are an anti-metaphor. Sugar and flour are consumed. Their entire job is to be transformed and cease to exist as themselves — flour becomes bread and stops being flour. Relay's promise is the opposite: what arrives is what was sent, intact. An ingredient does not survive the handoff; it disappears into the result. (This is the case that produced framework criterion 7, above.) Sugar is also closed on the crowd anyway: SugarCRM rebranded to SugarAI in April 2026, planting an established mark directly in AI.

But baking contains one object that is precisely Relay: the preferment. A portion of live culture held back from the last bake, fed, and carried into the next one — so no bake ever starts from nothing. The starter is never used up; it is divided and passed on. Bakeries hand them down for generations; cultures in daily use outlive the countries they were started in. Set that against the product's founding observation — AI sessions start blank — and it is the same sentence twice.

The brief already knew this and filed it too cheaply. The v0.6 riff pass logged Sourdough with the note "the starter culture passed hand to hand and kept alive by feeding… Context that stays alive by being used. Almost certainly too whimsical for segment #5 — logged because the metaphor is exactly the product." EC's baking proposal has independently converged on the one entry this document had already called exactly the product and then set aside. Under the warmth thesis — which argues approachability is a feature, not a liability — that dismissal deserves a second look rather than standing as settled.

The names, checked 2026-08-04:

Verdict: the field is real, and unusually open. After a fortnight in which nearly everything closed, three preferment words come back with nothing in tech — because the vocabulary is craft-specific enough that software has not colonised it yet. That makes this the first field since the loom to offer more than one live candidate. Levain is the most usable as a word (warm, short, pronounceable); Biga is the obtuse-lane pick — and, per the register pass below, the strongest on clearability; Sourdough is the warmth-thesis pick and the one with the best story.

Register pass — actual trademark records (2026-08-04)#

EC asked for this specifically, and it was the right call: the web pass that preceded it is the same methodology that got Weft wrong. Public register records, not just search-engine signals:

The structural finding — this field's trademark posture is actively favourable, not merely unblocked. These words are generic or descriptive inside baking, and that cuts two ways at once:

1. Nobody can own them in their own field. Note the shape of the bakery marks above — LEVAIN BAKERY, LEVAIN COOKIE, LEVAIN BREAD CO., or stylised-design marks. That is what a register looks like when the bare term is a generic term of art: you can only fence a compound or a logo, not the word.
2. **Applied to context infrastructure, the same words become arbitrary.** Real word, unrelated meaning — the Apple-for-computers structure. The obtuse-lane section of this brief already names arbitrary marks as "the strongest and most clearable" tier. So the field's openness is not luck; it is the distinctiveness spectrum working in our favour for the first time in the exercise. Every prior field failed because its words were suggestive of what we do. Baking words suggest nothing about context handoff to anyone outside this document — which is precisely the property that makes them defensible.

On trademark grounds specifically, the ranking inverts: Biga leads (no live mark, software classes untouched), then Poolish, then Sourdough, then Levain last — the most usable word carries the most crowded and most actively-growing register. Levain wins on phonaesthetics; Biga wins on clearability. That is the same warmth-versus-sober tension the brief has been carrying all along, now showing up inside a single field.

Methodology caveat — read this before relying on any of the above. This is a public-records pass, not a clearance search: Justia's own search endpoint and CIPO's record pages both refused automated access (HTTP 403), so the findings come from indexed records rather than a systematic enumeration. Not covered: pending applications not yet indexed, common-law/unregistered use, EUIPO/WIPO and other registers, and a class-by-class sweep of 9 and 42. The Weft lesson applies directly — absence of evidence in a web-accessible pass is not evidence of absence. Anything here that survives EC's taste still needs counsel and a paid database (Corsearch/CompuMark) before a dollar is spent.

Two live cautions beyond the register:

• Levain's Class 35 covers "business management, business administration" — retail-services-flavoured, but it is the one brush point with a software company's likely filings, and worth a lawyer's eye rather than mine.
• Practical, not legal: "levain" searches to cookies. Domain, handle, and SEO competition against an expanding NYC food brand is a real cost even where the legal risk is low. Biga and Poolish carry none of it.

Register caution, stated honestly: food metaphors run warm and risk reading as lifestyle rather than infrastructure — the same objection already logged against Sourdough, and the compliance buyer (segment #5) is exactly who it lands badly with. This field is a live test of the warmth thesis rather than an escape from it.

Narrative material, regardless of the name:

1. Pâte fermentée is a session handoff. "Old dough" — a piece of yesterday's dough worked into today's. Not a metaphor for the product; a description of it.
2. The mother. A starter is called a mother: divided, shared, named, and carried between bakers. The trust story is that it only survives if someone keeps feeding it — custody as an ongoing act, not a one-time seal. Good next to Symbolon and the Vestal flame.
3. The Yukon sourdough. The old-timer who wintered over, so called because they carried their starter against their body to keep it from freezing. A person defined by having successfully carried the live thing through a hard passage.
4. Positioning lines (added to the working set):
• No bake starts from nothing.
• Yesterday's dough in today's loaf.
• Keep it fed. Pass it on.

The carried fire — continuity as a live thing kept alight (EC direction, 2026-07-31)#

EC proposed Opal — "I love the fire." Opal itself is closed (below), but the proposal is worth more than its verdict, because it surfaces a distinction this brief had never drawn: there are two different fires in it, and they point opposite directions.

Fire one — opal's fire. Play-of-colour: the display shifts depending on the angle you hold the stone at. Genuinely beautiful, and the reason anyone loves opals. But for a custody brand it is the wrong story: Relay's whole promise is fidelity — what you receive is what was sent, unchanged, to everyone. A stone whose entire charm is looking different to every viewer is an anti-metaphor for that. Two more drags in the same direction: opals are famously fragile (they craze and crack if they dry out — a durability problem in a brand selling durability), and they carry a well-known bad-luck superstition. Same class of hazard as Anchor, where the name absorbed a reputation the product never earned.

Fire two — the carried fire. The ember taken from one hearth to light the next; the fire banked under ash at night so it survives unattended until morning; the sacred flame kept alight by a succession of keepers so it never has to be rekindled. This one is Relay, exactly. The product's founding observation — AI sessions start blank — is precisely "the fire went out, start again from nothing." The whole pre-modern practice of fire-carrying exists because relighting from zero was expensive, which is the same economics Relay is built on. It is one of the closest metaphor matches in the entire exercise, and it had never been scouted.

The names, checked 2026-07-31:

Verdict: brand-language and narrative direction, not a naming lane — the same shape as the drawn-line verdict, and for the same reason. The metaphor is crowded because it is good: Opal, Ember, and Hearth were all taken by AI companies who had the identical thought. Girasol is the single naming outlier worth carrying to a real check.

What the field is actually worth — narrative and copy:

1. The banked fire is a session handoff. Banking a fire means covering the embers with ash so they survive the night unattended and can be revived at dawn — pause, protect, resume, nothing relit from scratch. That is relay_session package/receive as a domestic ritual. The word curfew is the buried gift here: from French couvre-feu, "cover the fire" — the evening bell that told a town to bank its hearths. A nightly, civic, universally-understood continuity protocol.
2. The Vestal flame is custody by succession. A flame tended by an ordered line of keepers, each responsible for handing it on still alight. That is Relay's trust story — custody that survives the handoff — in one image. Belongs in brand narrative next to Symbolon, whether or not Vesta is ever a name.
3. Register note, in the field's favour. Fire imagery usually runs hot and energetic, which would fight the Sage/Ruler posture. A banked fire does not: it is quiet, tended, deliberate, unattended-but-safe. The field can be worked in the brand's actual register rather than against it.
4. Positioning lines (added to the working set):
• The fire doesn't go out between sessions.
• Every new session starts cold. Relay hands you the ember.
• Banked overnight. Alight in the morning.

The rope — climbing's spoken trust protocol#

• Belay ✕ closed 2026-07-30 (BELAY Solutions + Belay Technologies, already on record; plus a Python hardware-dev library at belay.dev and belay.ai, a live Norwegian AI climbing-analytics startup — four distinct "Belay" tech entities now) — the system where one climber secures another's rope, with a spoken verification ritual: "On belay?" — "Belay on." A live trust handshake, human-to-human, before weight is committed, and it is one letter from Relay. The ritual story is the best one in this cluster; the word is too crowded to carry it.
• Cairn ◐ (small software cos) — stones stacked by the traveler before you so the next one finds the route. Continuity of knowledge between strangers who never meet. Quiet, trail-register humility.

The score — music's continuity instructions#

• Attacca ○ (re-verified 2026-07-31 — still nothing in software; the only prominent holder is the Attacca Quartet, a Grammy-winning string ensemble, which is shadow, not collision) — the composer's instruction: proceed to the next movement without pause. Exactly a session handoff. Clean in category, short, pronounceable, slightly exotic. Strongest open name in the riff field — and after the 07-31 sweep, one of only three names anywhere in this document that has survived every check.
• Segue ◐ (Segue Software historical; Segway homophone) — the smooth transition, now generic English.
• Coda / Reprise ✕ (Coda docs; Reprise Records/software) — noted so they aren't re-proposed.

The cutting room + the stage — performed continuity#

• Matchcut ◐ (a vector-animation tool + a reel app) — the film edit where action flows seamlessly across a cut. The cut happens; the motion survives it. As a compound it may still clear; as a concept it's nearly a spec for the product.
• Understudy ✕ closed 2026-07-31 — knows the entire part; steps in mid-run with full context and the audience never feels the seam. The agent-handoff metaphor — so exactly the agent-handoff metaphor that someone built it: understudy-ai/understudy is a live open-source local AI agent that operates your computer ("An understudy watches. Then performs."), plus at least three more live Understudy products (a meeting-AI, a data-warehouse platform, a theatre-career assistant). The best stage metaphor in the field was also the most buildable one.
• Cue ✕ crowded — the handoff signal between performers.

The paused game — chess adjournment#

• Adjourn ○? — adjourned chess games sealed the next move in an envelope, held by the arbiter, resumed later exactly where play stopped. Pause + sealed intent + trusted resumption: that's relay_session package/receive in one ritual. "Sealed Move" also riffable as a two-word mark or feature name.

The route — postal/relay history beyond the racetrack#

• Estafette ◐ (an OSS CI system believed to exist — verify) — the military dispatch rider; also the Dutch word for relay race. Pairs with Relais as the European-heritage lane.
• Remount ○? — the fresh horse waiting at the relay post. Tech double meaning (component remount loses state — Relay is what survives it).
• Postroad ○? — the road network built for relayed mail.
• Portage ✕ closed 2026-07-30 (Portage Ventures + Portage Technologies/CyberTech, already on record; plus portage.ai — an AI integration consulting firm — and portage.so, an AI-enabled strategy-planning tool, both live product companies on the bare name) — carrying the canoe and cargo overland between navigable waters. Deeply Canadian (fits the Ontario entity), exactly "continuity across the stretch where the normal channel doesn't flow" — but now crowded on the AI-product name itself, not just in Canada.

The loom — thread carried across#

• Weft ✕ (letsweft.com — live, priced, MCP-native AI Scrumban tool for Claude Code/Cursor/Codex users; closed 2026-07-30, see Priority five) — the thread the shuttle carries back and forth through the warp; the thread that makes the fabric. The story stays; the word doesn't.
• Shuttle ✕ (shuttle.dev, Rust deploy platform) — the carrier itself; closed in dev-tooling.
• Needle ✕ (needle.ai — see "Checked: Needle," above) — the instrument that does the passing, not the fabric.
• Selvedge ○ — the self-finished edge that keeps the whole cloth from unraveling. Continuity as an edge property; denim-culture warmth.

Noted and closed in passing#

Synapse (fintech-collapse baggage + Azure/Matrix) · Ledger (crypto hardware) · Warp (terminal) · Pilot (copilot fatigue) · Shibboleth (SSO) · Basecamp, Knot, Heirloom, Bookmark — all carry a collision or a register problem; listed so the field map is honest about where the fences are.

The drawn line — connecting the dots & the weave (EC direction, 2026-07-23)#

Two metaphor fields investigated together because they turn out to be the same field — and unlike everything above, they aren't imported metaphors. They describe what the product already does. Relay's graph substrate literally connects dots: objects are nodes, "first contact creates the edge" (the ratified touch policy), and the Context Map draws the lines. The Open Signal mark is already a dot radiating. This field is native.

The names are closed; the field is not. Spot-checked:

Where this field actually pays off — identity and language, not the name:

1. The graphic system a CD should see. The mark is a dot. The map is dots with drawn lines. A constellation/weave graphic language — dot grids, edges drawn between them, threads crossing — extends the existing mark instead of replacing it. This is the first metaphor field of the whole exercise that converges with the shipped visual identity.
2. The childhood register. Dot-to-dot puzzles are numbered dots that become a picture — and Relay's dots are numbered too: Codes are the numbers on the dots. Warm, universally understood, and precise.
3. Positioning lines (added to the working set):
• The dots exist. Relay draws the lines.
• Stars are just points. You draw the constellation. (user-owned meaning — the trust posture in one image)
• Your tools drop the thread. Relay picks it up. (weave × continuity)
• Every relay is an edge. (internal/dev register — true at the graph-API level)

Verdict: keep "connect the dots"/"weave" as a brand-language and visual-system direction, not a naming lane. Update 2026-07-30: the one naming outlier this section had been carrying, Strand, is now closed too — AWS's Strands Agents SDK (see The drawn line table, above) is as direct a hit as this whole exercise has found. Braid and Interlace remain ◐ neighbors, not clean picks. That leaves Selvedge, from the loom family, as the sole open piece left across both fields (Weft, Strand's loom-side neighbor, also closed 2026-07-30; see Priority five, below).

Checked: Needle (EC proposal, 2026-07-30)#

EC's pitch: thread the metaphor through "relay" itself — threading the needle as the company/product story, not just loom material. Worth taking seriously on fit alone: unlike Weft or Selvedge (the fabric's byproduct), Needle is the instrument that does the passing — closer to what Relay actually is (the agent, not the pattern) than anything else in the loom family has been.

Verdict: ✕ closed as a company/product wordmark — the most direct category collision found in the whole exercise, ahead of Baton.

Four live "Needle" products, three of them squarely in AI-agent/context tooling — same count as Baton, but the closest hit is tighter: Baton AI's overlap was "context extraction" for a narrow vertical; needle.ai's own tagline claims the thread metaphor and the knowledge/context category Relay lives in. Checked NeedleCTX / "Needle CTX" too — no naming collision (only medical CTX-needle suture products turn up), which confirms the suffix strategy can't rescue this one: the bare root is the problem, not the pairing.

Register, independent of the collision: "needle" carries the drug-use idiom (same class of caution as Anchor's Spotify baggage) and "moving the needle" is a worn business cliché — two drags on top of the crowd.

Working it back into the recommended lanes — same pattern as Baton (closed as wordmark, kept as metaphor/motion) and Weave (closed as naming lane, kept as visual-language):

1. Reinforces, doesn't reopen, the drawn-line verdict above. Needle collides harder than Weave did — this is evidence the thread/weave field is getting more contested generally, not a reason to re-litigate it. File it alongside Weft/Shuttle/Selvedge in the loom family: where Weft is the thread and Shuttle is the (closed) carrier, Needle would have been the tool that does the piercing/passing — same family, same "brand-language, not naming lane" fence.
2. Positioning-copy material, with a caveat. "Threading the needle" is precision-under-constraint, which fits the Sage/Ruler register ("Context moves. Custody holds.") — but it's also idiomatically a difficulty/risk image (a tightrope), a different emotional key than the calm-confidence register the brief has been optimizing for. Log a candidate line for the copy/ area rather than promote it: "Relay threads the needle between sessions." — flagged, not recommended, until someone weighs the risk-framing against the calm-confidence posture.
3. Feature-name lane, not company name. Same move as Symbolon: a smaller-surface name has far less collision exposure than a company wordmark. Threadline is already sitting open in Cluster C (Throughline / Carryover / Threadline, line ~129) with no direct hit found — it's the closer, cleaner landing for this instinct than reviving "Needle" would be.
4. Warmth thesis, batched. Needle/thread carries real domestic-craft warmth (mending, needle-and-thread) alongside the still-unchecked riffs Bindle, Satchel, Skein, Spool, Twine — worth spot-checking that whole mending/carrying-craft cluster together next pass rather than one name at a time, since this result suggests the crowd risk there is general, not specific to Needle.

Two strategies deliberately left for the CD#

1. Coined names (invented words — the Kodak/Sonos lane). Nothing here was coined; that's a different craft with different costs (empty vessel, heavy meaning-building spend) and it's exactly what a naming specialist is for.
2. Compounds of the open pieces above (e.g. threading Relay's own vocab through the riff field). Cheap to generate, hard to judge without taste — CD territory.

The obtuse lane — arbitrary & fanciful names (EC direction, 2026-07-23)#

EC asked: what about obtuse names? The structural argument for them is strong, and it's the mirror image of everything this brief has found: every suggestive name is crowded precisely because it's suggestive — Baton, Weave, Steward, and Pigeon are all taken because they suggest the same thing to everyone. Trademark law encodes this as the distinctiveness spectrum: descriptive marks are weakest, suggestive marks are contested, and arbitrary marks (real word, unrelated meaning — Apple) and fanciful marks (invented — Kodak) are the strongest and most clearable. The riff field already contains proto-arbitrary picks (Seurat, Selvedge, Attacca read obtuse to anyone who doesn't know the story). A fully obtuse name is the logical endpoint of that line.

The costs are real and should be stated once: an empty vessel needs meaning poured in (marketing spend, time), and an obtuse name gives up the free explanation "Relay" currently provides. The mitigation is the CTX suffix strategy: RelayCTX already splits into [metaphor][category]. The suffix carries the category ("this is context infrastructure") so the prefix is free to be obtuse — ⟨X⟩CTX keeps continuity with the current name's structure even under a full rename.

Checked: Magi / "Magic CTX" (EC proposal, 2026-07-23)#

Verdict: ✕ closed — but it found the right lane. Three independent problems:

1. Magic.dev owns the adjacent word in our exact territory. Magic AI ($515M raised — Schmidt, CapitalG, Sequoia, Atlassian) builds frontier coding models whose entire stated differentiator is ultra-long context and a "Long-Term Memory Network." A product called "Magic CTX" or MagiCTX would read as their context product, not ours. This is the hardest single collision found in the whole exercise.
2. Google's Project Magi was their 2023 AI-search program — a project name, not a live consumer brand, but a big shadow on the exact word.
3. Register. The brand's settled posture is trust through legibility — "Continuity you can prove." In infrastructure, "no magic" is a compliment; a trust layer named Magic asserts the opposite of its own pitch. This closes the magic reading independently of any collision.

The twist worth keeping: magi ≠ magic. The Magi were Persian priest-scholars — a Sage-register word, not a magician one — who followed a star (the drawn line — the constellation field, again) to deliver something across a long journey (carriage, again). Even the pop shadow is on-brand: Evangelion's MAGI is a trio of independent systems that must reach consensus — distributed trust. So the story of the Magi sits squarely on Relay's metaphor map even though the name is closed. Logged so the CD sees why it was attractive and why it's fenced.

Guidance for the obtuse lane (for the CD pass)#

• Two to three syllables, spellable on first hearing, one clean domain.
• Prefer arbitrary-with-a-buried-story (Seurat, Attacca, Symbolon — obtuse on the surface, load-bearing underneath) over pure-fanciful (empty vessel). The buried story gives the brand team something to mine for a decade; pure coinage gives them a blank.
• The story, when surfaced, should land on one of the two pillars: continuity (carried across) or trust (proven, verified). If it lands on neither, it's decoration.
• Test every candidate as ⟨X⟩CTX and bare. If it only works with the suffix, it's a prefix, not a name.

Checked: CTXbuddy (EC proposal, 2026-07-23)#

Verdict: ✕ closed — register-fatal before the crowd is even counted.

1. Register. "Buddy" is mascot/consumer-helper language — the opposite pole from the settled posture. The locked vocabulary says orgs, teams, operators; the positioning says custody, proof, sovereignty. A trust layer doesn't have a buddy register — the buyer with compliance requirements (target segment #5) is the exact person "buddy" repels. Same failure class as Magic, from the cute end instead of the mystical.
2. Crowd anyway. "Buddy" is a saturated pattern in AI dev tooling: CodeBuddy (Tencent Cloud's AI assistant), CodeBuddy (funded Nebraska startup), codebuddy.com (dev studio), Coder Buddy (OSS), plus Buddy.works CI/CD and Buddy.ai (kids' tutor) from memory.
3. Structure. It inverts the CTX-suffix strategy — putting the category up front and the brand word behind it. "See-tee-ex-buddy" is five syllables, and the brand word it spends them on is "buddy."

One salvage: the warmth instinct is legitimate — see the next section, which upgrades it from a salvage note to a thesis, because EC pressed the point and the point is right.

Checked: Tooly (EC proposal, 2026-07-30)#

Verdict: ✕ closed — a different failure mode than anything checked so far. Every prior close (Baton, Weave, Needle, Pigeon) failed because a specific, well-funded competitor already owns the exact suggestive meaning. Tooly fails one level lower: "tool" is merely descriptive of the software category itself — every AI SaaS product is, functionally, "a tool." On the distinctiveness spectrum this brief has been using since the obtuse-lane section (line ~436), a descriptive mark is the weakest tier, below suggestive marks like Baton or Weave — it's barely registrable on its own terms, independent of who else is using it.

And plenty of others are:

No dominant "Baton AI"-style single blocker — but five unrelated live products on the bare word, and no clean domain anywhere (.com, .ai, and gettooly.app are all taken), which fails the framework's own criterion 4 outright. Checked ToolyCTX too — no naming collision, but it doesn't help: pairing a generic word with the CTX suffix just produces "[category-word]CTX," the same trap the obtuse-lane guidance already named ("if it only works with the suffix, it's a prefix, not a name" — line ~488) in reverse.

On metaphor fit — this is the real reason to close it, not the crowd. Tooly doesn't sit in any of Relay's live fields: not continuity/trust (Clusters A–D), not the loom/drawn-line thread family, not the split-token/rope/score/route riff clusters. "A tool" describes what almost any software is, not the specific promise — continuity that can be proven — this whole brief has been narrowing toward. It's a step backward from even Baton: Baton at least suggested the exchange itself.

The "-y" suffix is also already-litigated ground. This is structurally the diminutive lane the warmth thesis explicitly declined (below, "3. The diminutive lane"): cute-by-suffix, not cute-by-word, which the brief already flagged as reading like "a cold word wearing a warm hat." Tooly is that pattern with a descriptive root instead of a suggestive one — the weaker version of a move already ruled out.

Nothing to reroute this time. Baton kept its metaphor as visual/motion material; Needle's thread-instrument idea folded into the loom family and Threadline. Tooly doesn't have an underlying story worth carrying forward — if the instinct behind it is "practical, gets-out-of-your-way, just-works," that instinct is already better served by a warm concrete word than by a generic category word with a cute suffix on top. (Note, 2026-07-30: Belay and Portage — two of the three concrete words this argument originally pointed to — have since closed; see Priority five, below. Ferry is the one still standing.)

The warmth thesis (EC, 2026-07-23) — an open strategic tension#

EC's argument, recorded properly: cute and approachable means people won't be scared; the product feels comforting and warm to use inside your workflows; and a name that's a joy to say means people are inclined to share the language of the brand. That last clause is the sharpest — "joy to say" is a virality mechanism. People repeat words they enjoy saying; a brand whose verb is fun in the mouth gets spoken into rooms its marketing never reaches.

This is not a fringe position. It's how several category winners were built:

• Slack — enterprise workflow tool, deliberately warm, playful name ("slack" = the opposite of hustle), emoji-native voice. It beat sterner competitors partly because it was a joy to use and say.
• Dev-tool culture specifically loves warm names: Yarn, Bun, Vite, Homebrew, Deno — and warm mascots on serious infrastructure: the Rust crab, the Go gopher, GitHub's Octocat. Engineers, our exact audience, have repeatedly chosen the cute thing — cuteness and technical credibility demonstrably coexist in this market.
• Relay's own estate already leans this way in places: the easter-egg culture, the motion/pulse family, "Relay It" as a button. The warmth is latent, the way the baton was.

So the tension is real and should be named, not resolved silently: the settled Sage/Ruler posture ("Continuity you can prove," custody, sovereignty) optimizes for the compliance buyer's trust; the warmth thesis optimizes for the individual operator's affection — and affection is what spreads. These pull in different directions on the name, the voice, and the mark. This is a genuine EC/CD decision, not one this brief can settle. What it can do is structure the options:

1. Warm name, sober proof (the Slack model) — pick the name for joy, let the product surfaces carry the trust register. From the existing field, re-ranked through the warmth lens: Ferry (communal, everyday, gentle — arguably the warm pick already on the shortlist), Belay (fun in the mouth, and its ritual is literally two people taking care of each other), Attacca (musical, joyful), Portage (canoe-trip warmth, deeply Canadian), Weft/Bun-adjacent softness. Note Changeover reads industrial through this lens — the shortlist's internal ranking flips depending on which thesis wins.
2. Sober name, warm creature (the Rust model) — keep the trust- register name, pour the warmth into a mascot/motion character, voice, and microcopy. Cheapest path; already half-built (pulse family, eggs).
3. The diminutive lane ("-buddy," "-pal," "-y/-ie" names) — still not recommended even under the warmth thesis: it's the generic form of cute (crowded for exactly that reason), and warmth borrowed from a suffix reads as costume. Warmth should be structural — a word that IS warm (ferry, portage) beats a cold word wearing a warm hat (CTXbuddy).

Added to the CD guidance: phonaesthetics is now a first-class criterion — candidates should be scored on joy-to-say (open vowels, friendly plosives, ≤3 syllables, no spelling ambiguity) alongside clearability and metaphor fit. "Would a user enjoy telling a colleague 'just ⟨X⟩ it to me'?" is a real test, and it's the test EC's thesis wins.

Priority five — EC picks, TM-signal check (2026-07-24)#

EC ranked: Weft, Portage, Belay, Ferry, Seurat. Deeper availability pass (web signals only — still not a formal USPTO/CIPO search; that remains the gate before any commitment):

Net re-rank after signals, updated 2026-07-30: four of EC's five are now closed — only Ferry survives, and only provisionally. Weft closed on the sharpest collision the whole exercise has found (letsweft.com, live and MCP-native for exactly Relay's audience); Portage and Belay both worsened from "needs counsel" to closed once a second pass turned up live AI products on the bare names (portage.ai/portage.so; belay.ai) on top of the enterprise collisions already on record; Seurat was already closed. Ferry is the only one of the five left in the counsel-dependent tier it started in — one real collision (deployferry.io), different vertical, not fatal but not clean either. The convergence Weft sat at — warmth thesis, loom field, drawn-line field — doesn't evaporate with the word; Selvedge is now the sole open piece left across both families (see The loom, below, and The drawn line, above, where Strand also closed this pass).

Wider riff pass (v0.6) — all directions, unchecked ⚠ unless noted#

Per EC: keep riffing outward from what's held. New entries only; statuses are honest guesses pending checks.

The loom, extended: Twine ⚠ (to wind together; crowded-ish — the interactive-fiction tool, a data startup) · Spool ⚠ (thread wound for carrying; dev resonance in "spooling") · Skein ⚠ (carried from the 10–20 list: yarn bundle + geese in formation) · Heddle / Ply ⚠ (carried forward).

The route, extended: Packet ✕ closed 2026-07-31 — the double meaning (packet boats / data packets) was the best new find of v0.6, but the name didn't lapse with Equinix's retirement of the old cloud brand: packet.ai is a live GPU-as-a-Service platform for AI/ML developers (B200/H200 rentals, "75% cheaper than AWS"), and PacketAI is a separate observability company. AI-infrastructure, our exact audience · Skiff ⚠ (small fast boat; the prior Skiff brand — encrypted docs — was acquired by Notion and shut down; possibly lapsing) · Diligence ⚠ (the French stagecoach — and "due diligence"; probably too clever).

Carrier creatures (warmth thesis, mascot-native): Retriever ✕ closed 2026-07-31 — peak warmth, and peak collision: Retriever AI (San Francisco, founded 2025) is literally a browser-operating AI agent ("describe what you want done in plain English, it completes the work in your real browser"), plus a funded Korean compliance-AI startup named Retriever (pre-seed June 2026) and the Norwegian media-monitoring firm already on record. The metaphor was so apt someone shipped it · Husky ⚠ (the sled relay across the frozen gap; Husky Energy shadow in Canada).

The score, extended: Segno ◐ (checked 2026-07-31: the dominant holder is heuer/segno, a widely-used pure-Python QR-code library — a dev-tooling neighbor with real mindshare in exactly our audience, and an almost-too-perfect irony: the prior "Segno" literally generates codes) — dal segno: the mark in the score you return to and resume from. A session-resumption glyph (𝄋) that already exists in notation · Fermata ⚠ (the hold — a pause that preserves the note rather than ending it).

Proof register: Assay ⚠ (the test that proves the metal is what it claims — hallmarking's verification step; sober, sharp) · Sigil ⚠ (the personal seal; fantasy-register risk).

Living continuity (warmth × time): Sourdough ⚠ — the starter culture passed hand to hand and kept alive by feeding; Yukon slang for the old-timer who's wintered over. Context that stays alive by being used. Almost certainly too whimsical for segment #5 — logged because the metaphor is exactly the product and the CD should see it.

Next steps#

• Formal domain + USPTO/trademark clearance on the top 3 before any of this goes further — this doc is a scouting pass, not clearance
• Verbal test: read each shortlist name in a sentence next to "a Code," "a Stream," "received" — does the existing vocab system still sit naturally next to it?
• If a name survives clearance, next artifact is a lockup study in brand/identity-options.html-style page, not a repaint of the current mark — Open Signal may or may not survive the swap