The badge
A badge is an object
A badge is { mark, mount, ring }. The MARK is a drawing, the MOUNT is the ground it needs on cloth, and the RING is a property of the wearing. None of the three is baked into the others, so the same 20 drawings serve a chest, a t-shirt, a sticker and a page — and a new ring colour is a value rather than a new file.
One
The 20 marks
Each is one drawing in a neutral 56×56 box, re-framed from the chest art by translation and never redrawn. On their own — no mount, no ring — this is what a web symbol or a print uses.
Two
The mount is a def. The ring is a property.
One mark — lamp — five ways. The first three are three DEFS: no mount, the plaque a bare kind wears, the disc a dressed one wears. The last three are one def wearing a different colour: the disc strokes its bezel in currentColor and the rig hands it the ring. That is the whole difference between a property and a filename.
Three
One drawing, four surfaces
The compass below is the same def four times, not four copies that happen to match. The character NAMES it rather than containing it; the garment and the sticker compose it through the same resolver; the standalone SVG is re-framed from it by translation. Checked rather than claimed: the artwork hashes identically in all four.
Four
What it replaced
248 baked files became 22 defs. Every mark times every mount times every ring, flattened into a filename, in iconkind-v2 and copied again into merkind, dinokind and palkind — so a fourth ring colour meant twenty more files in each of four forms. It is now one value. The mount count is 2, one per SHAPE, and the rings are 3 entries in brand/mark.spec.json.
Proved before anything was deleted: an anchored mark composites to within one pixel in 192,000 of the baked part it replaced, and the ring change measured 0 differing pixels in 12,544.
© 2026 Freetek Ltd · ICONKIND is a registered trade mark of Freetek Ltd.