Why this shape
The stack you already work in, resolved into a J.
The mark is not a decorative monogram that happens to look like a J. It is the seven-layer diagram your own site is built around, stood upright: five narrow bars form the stem, the last two step out to make the hook. Read top to bottom it is People, Interface, Application, Protocol, Data, Infrastructure — and then Care. Read as a whole it is the first letter of your name. The logo says the same thing the work says, which is why it survives being explained.
Seven layers, bottom to top
The base is doing the arguing
L00 Care is separated by a wider gap than any other layer and drawn taller than any other bar. That is deliberate and it is the whole idea: everything above it is optional, replaceable, a matter of tooling and fashion. The layer underneath is not. If a reproduction can only hold one detail, hold that one.
Why a stack and not a wordmark
You work across blockchain, broadcast, classrooms and brand, and the usual way to show that is a list nobody reads. A stack shows it as one system with layers, which is how you actually describe it. The mark carries the argument into places the words cannot reach — a favicon, a stamp, an avatar.
Rationale
Why these colours
Lisbon on the outside, the research on the inside.
Three decisions, each with a reason you can say out loud in a pitch.
The blue of Lisbon's painted tiles, the ones on every façade between your flat and the office. It is also, not coincidentally, blueprint blue — the colour engineering drawings have been printed in for a century. A structural colour for a structural mark: it draws the six working layers, the links, the rules and the frame.
Your doctorate is on decentralised carbon rewards for the ICT sector under the Science Based Targets initiative. That work is the reason the base layer is green rather than another blue. Verde appears on exactly one thing in the mark — the Care layer — and on single accents elsewhere. Its scarcity is what makes it mean something.
Lime-washed Portuguese walls: off-white with a little sun in it. Pure #FFF next to a saturated cobalt is glary and reads as a template. This ground is calmer to look at for long stretches, which matters on a site with this much reading in it. Blue-black ink (#141824) rather than pure black keeps the whole palette inside one family.
Contrast
Which pairings are safe, measured rather than guessed.
WCAG contrast ratios for every pairing in the system. This is where the one hard rule comes from: verde is a shape colour, never a text colour on a light ground.
Lockups
Every lockup, on light and on dark.
Primary for the site, socials and email. Name lockup for the CV, decks and letterhead. Stacked for square placements. Each exists as a matched pair — use the dark-ground version on cobalt or ink, never the light one with a box behind it.
Primary · light grounds
Primary · dark grounds
Name · light grounds
Name · dark grounds
Stacked · light grounds
Stacked · dark grounds
Icons
Four layers where seven would blur.
Below roughly 40 px the seven bars close up into a smudge, so icons use a four-bar cut of the same drawing — two stem bars, one step, one base. Same gesture, fewer strokes. Verified by pixel count down to 16 px, where the base layer still holds its colour.
App icon · 512 px
Favicon · SVG, ICO, PNG
Azulejo tile · bullets, dividers
Social
Cards and banners, ready to upload.
Social cards are 1200 × 630. The LinkedIn banner is 1584 × 396 with the bottom-left corner left deliberately empty — that is where LinkedIn drops your profile photo, and anything placed there gets covered.
og-image-dark · 1200 × 630 · the default social card
og-image-light · 1200 × 630
linkedin-banner-dark · 1584 × 396
linkedin-banner-light · 1584 × 396
Type
Bricolage, Archivo, Plex Mono.
Aa
Bricolage Grotesque ExtraBold · wordmark, headlines
Aa
Archivo · body copy
Aa
IBM Plex Mono · labels, data, the brand line
Every supplied logo carries the wordmark as outlines rather than live text, so it renders identically on a machine without the fonts and needs no packaging step before print.
Using it
Clear space and common sense.
Clear space · one base-bar height
- Leave one base-bar height of clear space on all four sides.
- Cobalt mark on limewash, paper or white; the dark-ground pair on cobalt or ink.
- Below 40 px use an icon file, not the seven-bar mark.
- One-colour print, embossing and stamps: the ink version.
- Keep the wider gap above the base layer. It is the argument.
- Don't reorder, remove or evenly space the layers.
- Don't make the stem verde or the base cobalt — the colours carry the meaning.
- Don't stretch, rotate, skew, or add gradients, bevels or shadows.
- Don't set verde type on a light ground — 1.7:1, unreadable.
- Don't retype the wordmark in another face.