Brand

The visual identity of the Curly Message Format.

Each of the three SVGs is one <path> on a transparent background with no fill, no width and no height, so it renders black by default, takes any fill for a light-on-dark variant, and scales to whatever box it is given.

How the three marks relate

The wordmark is built from the icon, not drawn beside it. The {C at its head is curly-icon.svg's path, uniformly scaled so the icon's height becomes the cap height (256 units) and translated into place. Everything after it is drawn to four numbers the icon supplies:

So U, R, L and Y are one width and one weight, every corner in all four turns on one radius, and the three gaps are one gap. Free terminals are semicircles of half the stroke, 20.35, which is how the icon's arms end too. Where a stroke runs into the side of another — the R's leg under its bar, the Y's stem under its fork — the junction is rounded by 15.69.

Two shapes carry their own decisions:

• the R has a connected top: the stem runs the whole cap height and the bowl springs off it and closes back onto it, so the letter has no free bar terminal. Its bar sits 133.76 below the cap line and the leg leaves that bar 53.95 right of the stem, at 38.3° from vertical;
• the Y is a U fork on a stem, not a rotated brace. The fork is the letter width, its bar sits 128.55 below the cap line, and the stem rises 25.50 into that bar so the two read as one letter. The fork overlaps the L's foot by 37.27 — the mark's one kern, which is why L and Y have no gap between them.

The tagline is the one part of the wordmark that is not drawn from the icon's numbers. It is set in capitals at 52.0 with 0.22 em of letter spacing, its cap line 72 below the letters' baseline, and its ink centre on the wordmark's ink centre rather than on the viewBox — the { at the head and the Y at the tail weigh differently, so centring on the box would read as off-centre.

The icon survives a redraw of the letters unchanged: where it appears it keeps the modulation it was drawn with, which is why its brace reads lighter than the letters beside it. The letters are made of straight lines and circular arcs only; the tagline carries the quadratics of its typeface, converted to outlines.

Using them

• Give the wordmark clear space of at least half the letter stroke, which is the padding already inside the viewBox.
• Below roughly 280 px wide the tagline stops being legible: use curly-wordmark-no-tagline.svg, which stays readable down to about 64 px.
• Colour by setting fill on the <svg> or the <path>, or with color and fill="currentColor" if you add that attribute yourself.

Colour

The plates at the top are variant A of the dark treatment: the brace in the theme colour, the C and the letters in the base, the tagline dimmed. The icon is the same split with nothing after the C, which is the point of drawing the wordmark from it.

The palette is settled, and it is two palettes. A ground carries its own theme colour, because one value cannot serve both: the amber that sits at 8.8:1 on the dark ground falls to 1.9:1 on the light one.

Dark:

Light:

Every pair but one clears the 4.5:1 that text is held to. The light theme colour clears 3:1 instead, which is what WCAG 1.4.11 asks of a graphic, and it is still the only theme value that ground has: the brace takes it, and so do a border, a rule, a label, a version pill and a link. Words set in it measure 3.1:1, under the 4.5:1 that 1.4.3 asks of text. Where that threshold is binding they take the base — not a second red, which at the size a link is set reads as the first one misprinted.

Nothing in the SVGs depends on any of it: they carry no fill at all.

Two colours need two elements. Each SVG is a single <path> filled nonzero, so fill cannot colour the brace apart from the rest; split it into one <path> per colour, each carrying the subpaths of that colour together, in their original order and still filled nonzero. In curly-icon.svg the first subpath is the brace and the second the C. In curly-wordmark.svg those two come first in the same order, then eleven for the letters and twenty-seven for the tagline.

One <path> per subpath is not the same thing, and the tagline is where the difference shows: the O's counter is a subpath the nonzero rule cuts out of the ring around it, and given an element of its own it fills the letter in.

Licence

The marks are not covered by the repository's MIT licence. The name Curly Message Format, the three SVGs and the two plates are © 2026 G.A.W.Group, s.r.o., all rights reserved, under the terms in LICENSE beside this file. This README is not one of them: it is MIT like everything else in the repository.

The short of it: you may say your software implements the format, and you may use these files unchanged to refer to it — scaled to any size, in any single colour. You may not redraw them, fold them into a mark of your own, or use them in a way that reads as official or endorsed. The format is open; its marks are how people tell it apart from everything else.

Provenance

The marks were traced from three generated bitmaps — the icon on a light rounded tile, and two wordmark variants differing only in the Y. They are not kept here. Nothing in these files still matches them: the letters were redrawn afterwards to the icon's own numbers and the tagline was re-set in capitals, so the bitmaps are the origin of the mark rather than a target it answers to.

The tagline is set in Outfit 600, converted to outlines. The face is published under the SIL Open Font License 1.1; artwork made with a font is not itself a font, so the outlines carry no licence obligation, but the attribution is recorded here because the wordmark cannot be re-set without it.