Materials — iconkind

Development

Materials

The woven look is a brand identifier of its own — the site's header and footer today, and in time the labels, the clothing and some of the plush. This page works out how it sits beside the palette.

Graham, 2026-09-13, pleased with the woven header and navy canvas footer: 'this natural look can be incorporated into plush in some cases, clothing. It is another brand identifier … one issue could be palettes and how this works, because we are introducing in some places textures for the web graphics and specifications for material used.'

Status: proposal. Drawn from brand/materials.json.

Palette and materials

One colour, three ways

A colour is defined once, in palette.json. A texture is never a new colour: it is a ground and threads named from the palette, drawn at a stated pitch and strength. Anything that cannot draw texture uses the material's flat colour.

Colour — brand/palette.json, unchanged: every colour is named once, with its screen value; its print values stay empty until they are chosen with a press profile in hand.

Material — brand/materials.json: a ground and threads, named from the palette, and a weave. Realised three ways: WEB, the texture a screen draws; PRODUCT, the specification a supplier makes it to — empty until specified with them, never guessed; FLAT, the one colour used wherever texture cannot be drawn.

So the web can gain texture and a product can gain a real specification without a single new colour: a lab dip is matched TO a palette name, and recorded against it.

The cloth

The fabrics

Navy canvas — The cloth the site ends in; woven tabs and neck labels; a plush body.

Ground mark.navy (#2b3247); threads brand.cream, brand.ink; weave canvas; flat mark.navy.

Web (site footer): icon.css .ik-footer: a basket weave of cream warp (8.5%) and ink weft (30%) at a 3.4px pitch, with the fibre grain of assets/textures/canvas-grain-light.svg and canvas-grain-dark.svg.

Product: construction plain (canvas) weave; fibre — to specify with a supplier; weightGsm — to specify with a supplier; colourMatch — to specify with a supplier; finish — to specify with a supplier.

Cream weave — The site's header cloth; the ground of a cream woven label; a sewn patch.

Ground brand.cream (#fef6e8); threads mark.navy; weave plain; flat brand.cream.

Web (site header): icon.css .ik-header: navy warp (3.5%) and weft (3%) at a 2px pitch over the cream, with a navy stitch above the bottom edge.

Product: construction damask woven label; fibre — to specify with a supplier; weightGsm — to specify with a supplier; colourMatch — to specify with a supplier; finish — to specify with a supplier.

Selvedge thread — The identity thread: six brand colours along a cream edge. The footer's top and bottom edge; inside-neck tape; a seam tag; packaging tape.

Edge mark.paper; threads brand.sage-soft, mark.signal-blue, mark.violet, mark.amber, mark.gold-deep, mark.rose.

Web (site footer, top and bottom): icon.css .ik-footer::before and ::after: 20px dashes with 6px gaps, 3px tall, 4px under a 3px cream edge.

Product: construction woven jacquard tape; widthMm — to specify with a supplier; colourMatch — to specify with a supplier.

Clothing

On a t-shirt

The garment keeps its own cloth; the materials arrive as detail — the sun embroidered in thread, a navy canvas woven label inside the neck, the selvedge thread as neck tape and as a small tag in the hem seam.

Plush

On plush

The figure every kind shares, made in cloth: one in navy canvas with cream woven ear muffs, one in cream weave with navy muffs. Each wears a sewn woven chest label in place of the printed plaque, and a selvedge tag in the side seam — the identity thread you can hold.

T-shirt · Cream weave — the body cloth stays the garment's own; navy thread embroiders the sun on the chest

T-shirt · Navy canvas — a woven neck label inside the back neck: the sun and ICONKIND in cream thread

T-shirt · Selvedge thread — neck tape inside the back neck, and a seam tag at the hem

Plush · Navy canvas — a body in canvas, with cream woven ear muffs

Plush · Cream weave — a sewn woven chest label with a navy stitched edge, in place of the printed plaque

Plush · Selvedge thread — a folded seam tag in the side seam — the identity thread you can hold

To decide

1. Whether materials.json becomes part of the brand system, as drawn here: colours only in palette.json, materials naming them.

2. Which products carry which material — the applications above are examples, not a range.

3. The physical specifications, with suppliers: fibre, weight, weave, and a lab dip for each named colour.

4. Whether a garment's cloth colours (brand/tshirt.spec.json) should become palette names too — see the finding below.

Finding — brand/tshirt.spec.json defines its cloths as plain hex values, not palette names. The cream cloth's body (#f2ece0) is exactly mark.bone; its shade (#e6dece) is not named. So a garment's colour is today defined outside the palette — the same split this file is written to avoid for materials.