Changelog — brand/#

The identity and design language: mark, lockups, tokens, type, brand guide, asset pack, gallery + motion lab. Newest first; full detail in git log -- brand/.

2026-08-04 — register pass on the starter field; Biga leads (naming v0.14)#

• EC asked for an actual trademark register check on the baking names rather than web signals — the right call, since web signals are exactly what got Weft wrong. BRIEF.name-alternatives.md (v0.14) gains a "Register pass" subsection with the records found.
• Biga: three US records, all dead — Class 25 footwear (Reg. 1114542, cancelled §8), Class 28 games (Ser. 87829284, abandoned 2019), restaurant services (Ser. 75773999, abandoned 2002). No live mark; Classes 9 and 42 never touched. The cleanest register position found anywhere in this exploration.
• Levain: crowded, but entirely in food/retail classes — LEVAIN BAKERY (Ser. 90772217), LEVAIN (Ser. 98689185), LEVAIN OATMEAL RAISIN (Reg. 6420151), LEVAIN COOKIE, LEVAIN BREAD CO., all Class 30 and/or 35; SAF LEVAIN cancelled 2007. Plus CIPO 2366445 — CPST Intellectual Property Inc, US priority Aug 2024, under examination — an actively growing Canadian filing, which matters for an Ontario entity.
• Poolish: no records surfaced. Sourdough: nothing in the software classes; generic for bread, which is precisely what makes it arbitrary for software.
• Structural finding: these words are generic inside baking, so nobody can own them there (note the bakery marks are all compounds or stylised — LEVAIN BAKERY, LEVAIN COOKIE). Applied to context infrastructure they become arbitrary marks, the strongest registrable tier per the brief's own obtuse-lane section. The field is favourably structured, not just accidentally empty.
• On trademark grounds the ranking inverts: Biga leads, Levain trails. Levain still wins on phonaesthetics — the same warmth-versus-sober tension, now inside one field.
• Methodology stated plainly: public/indexed records only. Justia's search endpoint and CIPO's record pages both returned HTTP 403 to automated access, so this is not a systematic class sweep and not a clearance search. Pending-but-unindexed filings, common-law use, and non-US/CA registers are uncovered. Counsel + a paid database still gate any spend.
• naming-map.html / naming-survivors.html — Levain and Biga stories corrected; the survivors tier-three row now leads with Biga.

2026-08-04 — the starter field opens; criterion 7 added (naming v0.13)#

• BRIEF.name-alternatives.md (v0.13) — EC proposed sugar / flour ("elementals to baking something"). Sugar closes: SugarCRM rebranded to SugarAI in April 2026, planting an established mark directly in AI. Flour fails on metaphor before collisions matter. But the field splits exactly as the fire field did: ingredients are consumed, while the preferment — a portion held back, fed, and carried into the next bake so nothing starts from nothing — is precisely the product.
• Levain, Poolish, and Biga all return nothing in tech — the most open field since the loom, because the vocabulary is craft-specific enough that software hasn't colonised it. Leaven ◐ (Leaven Foods, an "Instant Sourdough platform", 100+ customers — different vertical, live company inside the exact metaphor). Sourdough, logged in v0.6 as "exactly the product" then shelved as too whimsical, is unshelved: that was a taste call made before the warmth thesis existed.
• New framework criterion 7 — "does the object survive the handoff?" Two EC proposals in a row landed on the right field and the wrong half: opal's play-of-colour fire vs the carried ember; sugar and flour vs the starter. Both splits are the same one — consumed versus passed on — and a metaphor whose object is used up is an anti-metaphor for a custody brand no matter how clean its registry search is.
• naming-map.html — new "The starter" field (Levain/Biga/Poolish open, Leaven neighbours, Sugar/Flour closed); Sourdough moved out of Carrier creatures and restatused open.
• naming-fence.html — Sugar and Flour added (34 names / 12 fields).
• naming-survivors.html — headline was hardcoded to "Five names left standing" and is now stale-proof; tier three added for the single-pass starter names, kept explicitly below the twice-verified three; attrition strip recounted (34 closed / 22 neighbours-unchecked / 9 standing).

2026-08-04 — Code input demo accepts the real mint length#

• relay-brand-guide.html — the live "Enter a relay Code" input carried maxlength="6" and an ABC123 placeholder, so a current 10-character Code pasted into the demo was silently truncated (the same defect that blocked the server-side mint bump on mobile). Now maxlength="16", tracking @relay/shared CODE_MAX_LENGTH rather than the mint length, with a comment saying why. brand-guide.html's "Six characters carry the whole product." headline is not changed here — that is a positioning line and needs an EC call.

2026-07-31 — Opal checked; the carried-fire cluster opens (naming v0.12)#

• BRIEF.name-alternatives.md (v0.12) — EC proposed Opal ("I love the fire"). Closed fatally: Google Opal, the Labs AI mini-app builder, now folded into Gemini and live in 160+ countries. But the proposal opens a new cluster 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's angle; Relay's promise is that it doesn't) — plus opals craze when dry and carry a bad-luck superstition, Anchor-class baggage. The carried fire is the opposite: the ember taken to light the next hearth, the fire banked under ash overnight so nobody relights from zero. One of the closest metaphor matches in the whole exercise, never previously scouted.
• Field checked: Ember ✕ (four+ live AI-agent products, one shipping an MCP server, plus Ember.js mindshare), Hearth ✕ (hearth.ai "relational intelligence" + gethearth.com's $1M-ARR AI receptionist), Vesta ◐ (fintech AI agents — but the Vestal-flame story is the field's best), Asterism ◐ (IT-services companies; noted because asterism double-hits the drawn-line field where Constellation was fatal), Chatoyance ○ (open and unusable — nobody spells it), Girasol ○? (an opal variety, open on a first pass — the field's one live outlier).
• Verdict mirrors the drawn-line field: brand-language and narrative, not a naming lane. Banking a fire = a session handoff as domestic ritual (curfew ← couvre-feu, "cover the fire"); the Vestal flame = custody by unbroken succession, narrative material next to Symbolon. Three positioning lines added to the working set.
• naming-map.html — new "The carried fire" field plotted (Opal, Ember, Hearth closed; Girasol as unchecked riff).
• naming-fence.html — Opal, Ember, Hearth added (32 names / 11 fields).

2026-07-31 — full-field sweep + Still Standing survivors board (naming v0.10–v0.11)#

• BRIEF.name-alternatives.md (v0.10) — Passit (EC proposal) checked: open with real cautions, not closed. No AI-agent-tooling collision, but passit.io (open-source zero-knowledge password manager) shares the custody/trust mental model and passit.ca holds a registered ® in another class. Filed under Cluster B (evolve-the-verb lane); counsel tier alongside Ferry. Register note: "Passit" must coexist with the live "Relay It" button.
• BRIEF.name-alternatives.md (v0.11) — sweep of the remaining unchecked/verify-tier names: Packet closes (packet.ai GPU cloud for AI devs + PacketAI observability), Retriever closes (Retriever AI — a live browser-operating agent, SF 2025 — plus a funded Korean compliance-AI namesake), Understudy closes (understudy-ai: a live open-source computer-operating agent, "An understudy watches. Then performs.", plus three more live Understudy products). Segno downgrades to neighbors (heuer/segno, the widely-used Python QR-code library — a code-generating neighbor, fittingly), Symbolon downgrades to neighbors (Symbolon AG, AI-supported coaching; feature-name lane unaffected). Attacca, Selvedge, Changeover re-verified clean.
• naming-survivors.html — new page, the mirror of The Fence: the five survivors (tier one: Attacca / Selvedge / Changeover, checked clean twice; tier two: Ferry / Passit, counsel tier), each as a full specimen row with holds-because / still-carries / next-gate meta; an attrition strip telling the exploration in dots (60 checked · 5 standing); the three lanes open regardless (feature names, coined, compounds). Card on the brand index; clean URL /brand/survivors.
• naming-map.html — seven nodes restatused (Packet/Retriever/Understudy → closed, Segno/Symbolon → neighbors, Attacca/Selvedge/Changeover annotated as survivors); date stamps refreshed; thumb menu gains Still Standing + The Fence links (height retuned); brief chip → v0.11.
• naming-fence.html — Packet, Retriever, Understudy added (29 names, 10 fields now, incl. new Carrier creatures group).
• naming-specimens.html — Understudy removed from the riff wall (closed); Symbolon repilled to Neighbors with the feature-lane note.

2026-07-30 — Weft, Portage, Belay, Strand close: only Ferry survives (naming v0.9)#

• BRIEF.name-alternatives.md (v0.9) — letsweft.com, surfaced by EC, is a live, priced, MCP-native AI Scrumban task manager built specifically for Claude Code/Cursor/Codex users — same buyer, same protocol, same category as Relay. This closes Weft, which had led EC's priority five since the 2026-07-24 pass; the July 24 finding ("no dominant mark in AI/agent tooling") was wrong, not stale — a closer look found what the first web pass missed. A follow-up pass on everything still standing found more: Strand closes (AWS's Strands Agents SDK — 16.7M downloads/mo, production at Smartsheet/Swisscom/Jit, Anthropic a listed contributor); Portage worsens to closed (portage.ai, portage.so — two live AI product companies — on top of the Canadian crowding already on record); Belay worsens to closed (belay.ai, a live AI climbing-analytics startup, makes four distinct "Belay" tech entities). Net effect: of EC's original five (Weft · Portage · Belay · Ferry · Seurat), only Ferry is still standing, and only in the counsel-dependent tier it started in. Selvedge is now the sole open piece across the loom + drawn-line families.
• naming-map.html — Weft, Portage, Belay, and Strand all re-flagged from EC-priority/open to closed, stories updated with each finding.
• naming-fence.html — Weft, Portage, Belay, and Strand added to the ledger (now 26 names across 9 fields), all flagged fresh.
• naming-specimens.html — Weft, Portage, Belay, and Strand removed from the riff wall — the page's own rule is that closed names aren't set as wordmarks. (Seurat's presence there, closed since 2026-07-24, was a pre-existing drift — fixed in passing.)

2026-07-30 — Needle/Tooly/Trust/Transparency checked; The Fence (naming v0.7)#

• BRIEF.name-alternatives.md (v0.7) — four EC proposals checked and closed: Needle (needle.ai's own tagline is "Knowledge Threading Platform" — reinforces the drawn-line field's brand-language-not-naming-lane verdict), Tooly (generic/descriptive, not suggestive — closes on genericness + the diminutive-lane guidance, not a single dominant collision), and the bare words Trust and Transparency (closes Cluster E harder — Cyera's $12B "trust layer" positioning, Transparency International's brand equity).
• naming-map.html — added Needle to The loom, and Tooly/Trust/Transparency to Trust words & proposals.
• naming-exploration.html — Position 06 (the trust field) dq-grid grows from 6 to 8 entries; pull-quote updated to note the bare-word check.
• naming-fence.html — new page. The companion ledger to the specimens board: every closed name across the whole exploration (22 across 7 fields), struck through with its one-line reason, grouped by metaphor field, with a "freshly fenced this pass" strip up top. Card added to the Naming Exploration section; clean URL /brand/fence.

2026-07-29 — pre-existing drift fixed by the new index-card CI check#

• scripts/check_index_cards.py (see concepts/CHANGELOG.md) found four archived-version files that existed on disk but were never referenced anywhere: identity-options-v35pre.html, brand-guide.html (the pre-rename predecessor to relay-brand-guide.html), type-specimen-v33.html, font-options-v34.html, plus concepts/app-components-v34.html (carded here since its current version already is). All five added as archived cards next to their current versions.

2026-07-29 — Poster Studio, Playground, and PNG asset pack ported from frozen prototype#

• New: poster-studio.html (12 headline riffs × 5 lenses × 3 formats, minted Code per deal, SVG download) and playground.html (live identity component playground against relay-tokens-v35.css) — both from relay FMZRNG.
• New: brand/assets/png/* — the 12 committed PNG exports of the lockup/ mark/avatar/social-og assets (pack v3.5.0); main previously only carried the SVG sources.
• All of the above only ever landed on the prototype branch, which froze at the 2026-07-19 restructure and is slated for deletion 2026-08-09 — ported here so nothing is lost, with cards added in this same change.

2026-07-26 — thumb menu (slide-up reveal)#

• naming-map.html — the Open Signal mark becomes a floating thumb-zone button (bottom-right): tapping it slides the whole page up to reveal the naming-estate menu that lives beneath the page (Map / track / specimens / brief / brand index + theme toggle, now thumb-reachable — removed from the topbar). Scrim-tap or Esc closes; mark rotates 45° as the close affordance; reduced-motion safe. Per EC direction from mobile review — the detail popup card pattern stays as-is.

2026-07-26 — naming map full-bleed revision#

• naming-map.html — shell stripped per EC: the map is now full-bleed (100vw, no bordered container), legend and detail card are typographic (hairline only, blur backdrop), and the sky was re-laid on a larger canvas (1280×840, hand-tuned per-field spacing) fixing the mobile clipping (RelayCTX/Selvedge cut off) and cluster collisions (Weft in the trust row, Seurat/Strand, Tally/Segno) visible in EC's screenshot. Mobile pans edge-to-edge; desktop fits without scroll.

2026-07-24 — priority five TM check + the naming map (naming v0.6)#

• BRIEF.name-alternatives.md v0.6 — EC's priority five (Weft · Portage · Belay · Ferry · Seurat) checked for TM signals. Re-rank: Weft leads (clearest field — three of the exercise's currents converge on it); Portage crowded precisely in Canada (Portage Tech, Portage CyberTech, Portage Ventures + Gentoo mindshare); Belay heavier than first read (Belay Technologies, defense software); Ferry has a funded namesake dev platform (deployferry.io); Seurat closed (Seurat Technologies, $79M+, named for the same pointillism reason). Wider riff pass added: Packet (packet boats + data packets — best new double), Retriever, Segno, Fermata, Skiff, Twine, Spool, Assay, Sigil, Husky, Sourdough.
• naming-map.html — the new main page of the naming work: all ~45 candidates as one constellation radiating from RelayCTX in the Open Signal geometry, clustered by metaphor field; statuses encoded (priority/open/neighbors/unchecked/closed); click-for-story detail card; ranked list twin. Clean URL /brand/naming retargeted here (track page moves to /brand/naming-track); index cards reshuffled — map is the fresh start-here card.

2026-07-23 — CTXbuddy check + the warmth thesis (naming v0.5.1)#

• BRIEF.name-alternatives.md — CTXbuddy (EC proposal) logged checked-and- closed (register + crowd + structure), but EC's underlying argument upgraded to a named strategic section: the warmth thesis — cute/ approachable reduces fear, feels comforting in workflows, and joy-to-say spreads the brand's language. Slack + dev-tool precedent (Yarn, Bun, the Rust crab) recorded; three structured options (warm name/sober proof · sober name/warm creature · diminutive lane, still not recommended); the shortlist re-ranked through the warmth lens (Ferry becomes the warm pick; Changeover reads industrial). Phonaesthetics ("joy to say") added as a first-class CD criterion. Sage/Ruler vs warmth named as an open EC/CD decision — deliberately unresolved.

2026-07-23 — obtuse lane + naming specimens (naming v0.5)#

• BRIEF.name-alternatives.md v0.5 — "The obtuse lane": the distinctiveness- spectrum argument for arbitrary/fanciful names (every suggestive name we checked is crowded because it's suggestive), the CTX-suffix strategy (⟨X⟩CTX keeps the category while the prefix moves), and the Magi / MagicCTX verdict (✕): Magic.dev ($515M, long-term-memory/context positioning) owns the adjacent word in our exact territory, Google's Project Magi shadows it, and "magic" asserts the opposite of trust- through-legibility — though the magi story (Sage-register star- followers delivering across a journey) sits squarely on the metaphor map and is logged for the CD.
• naming-specimens.html — visual specimen board: shortlist rendered as dual-ground wordmark cards (bare + CTX suffix), the riff wall set in type with buried stories + clearance pills (closed names deliberately not set), and three drawn-line motif swatches (dot-to-dot with Code- numbered dots, constellation, weft). Card on the brand index; clean URL /brand/specimens.

2026-07-23 — connect-the-dots / weave investigation (naming v0.4)#

• BRIEF.name-alternatives.md v0.4 — "The drawn line": EC-directed look at connecting-the-dots + weave. Finding: the only native metaphor field — it describes the shipped graph substrate (first contact creates the edge; Codes are the numbers on the dots) — but the big names are closed (Weave = W&B/CoreWeave agent-observability toolkit, dead center of category; Constellation = fatal Canadian collision). Verdict: brand-language + visual-system direction, not a naming lane; Strand carried as the one open-ish outlier. New positioning lines incl. "The dots exist. Relay draws the lines."
• naming-exploration.html — riff-field stop gains "The drawn line" lane.

2026-07-22 — riff field (naming v0.3)#

• BRIEF.name-alternatives.md v0.3 — added "The riff field," a divergent seedbed for the eventual creative-director engagement: split-token proof artifacts (Symbolon — the etymology of "symbol" is literally a Code), belay/cairn trust rituals, musical continuity (Attacca — strongest open name found), stage/cutting-room (Understudy, Matchcut, Adjourn), postal relay history (Estafette, Remount, Portage), and the loom (Weft, Selvedge). Statuses: open / neighbors / unchecked; also logged Pigeon (EC proposal) as checked-and-closed. Coined names + compounds flagged as deliberate CD territory.
• naming-exploration.html — new Position 08 riff-field stop (chip wall by metaphor family); final stop renumbered to 09.

2026-07-22 — continuity/trust pass (naming v0.2)#

• BRIEF.name-alternatives.md v0.2 — added Cluster E (trust vocabulary: Steward, Custodian, Provenance, Vouch, Lineage, Keepsake — all scouted, all closed; the most colonized field checked), the synthesis (name from continuity, position on trust), and working positioning lines in the promise/proof two-beat register ("Context moves. Custody holds.").
• naming-exploration.html — two new stops: the trust field disqualification and the continuity-as-promise / trust-as-proof register with the lead line.

2026-07-22 — naming-exploration showcase page#

• naming-exploration.html — visual companion to BRIEF.name-alternatives.md: a vertical "track" narrative (current position → track pressure → exchange zones → Baton disqualified → shortlist → what survives a rename) on the v3.5 tokens, reusing the product's own Received/Pending/Expired status vocabulary as a metaphor for name-candidate clearance. Card added to the brand index (is-fresh); clean URL /brand/naming via _redirects.

2026-07-22 — name alternatives exploration#

• BRIEF.name-alternatives.md — contingency brainstorm for a RelayCTX name evolution, prompted by the baton/relay-race metaphor already latent in vocab. Flags that "Baton" as a literal wordmark is contested by three live AI-agent-tooling products; shortlists Changeover / Ferry / Relais for formal clearance instead.
• Added a competitive note on Baton AI (getbaton.ai): no product overlap, but their "customer handoffs" positioning shares Relay's vocabulary territory — a category-confusion risk on top of the trademark collision.

2026-07-19 — area restructure#

• Type/identity explorations moved in from web/: font-options*.html, emblem-v1.html, ladder-v1.html; root gallery.html homed here. Old URLs 301 via _redirects.
• Motion lab + creative gallery (brand animation explorations) landed.
• Brand asset pack v3.5.0 — portable lockups, social + avatar, canon index (assets/).
• identity-options rebuilt to v3.5 (Open Signal locked, RelayCTX™ lockup); previous version archived as identity-options-v35pre.html.

2026-07 (pre-restructure)#

• 07-18 Trademark pass: ™ first-use on wordmarks + entity credit across brand guide, BRAND-BRIEF, design system, README; .rl-tm rule.
• 07-16 and earlier v3.5 neutral-first token layer (relay-tokens-v35.css) ratified as source of truth; interactive brand guide on v3.5; emblem + headline-ladder concepts (RCTX-799 / RCTX-282).

Canon#

• Tokens: relay-tokens-v35.css (design intent) ↔ relay-app/packages/ui/tokens.css (implementation) — keep in sync.
• Guide: relay-brand-guide.html · Assets: assets/