Stego Coffee · Identity · Round four
Drawing the tail
Keep the mark. Add a tail with small spikes. Three things had to be solved before it read as a tail rather than a smudge.
Problem one
the spikes had no weightDrawn as tapering cones five units wide, the spikes read as hairs against fifteen-unit back plates. Redrawing them with the same plate geometry at a narrower ratio fixed it in one move — and did something better than fix it, because now they read as the back ridge continuing down the tail. One drawing, three sizes.
Problem two
no room for a tailThe body filled the grid edge to edge, so the tail and its spikes had nowhere to go and fused into a blob on the left. The body is now drawn at 0.80 scale, translated (11, 9.5), freeing the left third. That single change is the whole reason the tail reads.
Problem three
two numbers, found by testingI had the sign of the surface normal backwards to begin with. Rather than re-derive it, I drew the range and looked. Rotation −20°, graduated −14 / −26 / −38: at −50 the spikes lie flat along the tail, at +25 they lean into the body and cut notches out of it.
Sink 4 units below the tail’s upper edge — the same trick the back plates use against the dome. At 0 they float and notch the outline; at 7 they are buried into bumps.
How many
threeTwo reads thin. Four serrates into a saw edge. Three continues the ridge and still graduates.
The cost
stated plainlyThe tail makes the mark wide — 55.9 × 34.4 units against the original’s 52 × 43. Two consequences follow, and neither is fixable by drawing harder.
In a circular favicon it leaves large empty margins above and below. It fits at 0.86 scale, but it is airier than the compact original. And at 16px the tail and spikes blur into the body. It is clearly better at 24px and above, and clearly worse at 16.
So the same answer as round two, one level up: the compact original for the browser tab, the tailed version everywhere with room — a header, a bag, a shop window. Same family, two crops. That is not a compromise; it is what a mark that has to work from 16px to a metre wide normally requires.
Side by side
at three sizesreversed
The original
Compact, nearly square, and the only one of the two that holds its detail at favicon size.
Keep for — the browser tab.reversed
With the tail
Unmistakably a stegosaurus, and the ridge now runs the full length of the animal instead of stopping at its shoulders.
Use where — there is room. 24px and up.Outcome · decided 2026-08-31
Explored and declined. The original mark stands. The tail works and the drawing problems were all solvable, but it never beat the thing it was trying to improve on — it costs favicon legibility and buys a silhouette the compact mark did not actually need.
The files are kept at mark-tail-mono.svg and favicon-tail.svg, alongside the palette exports, in case a large-format use ever wants a fuller animal. Nothing on the site changed at any point in this round.
The thing worth carrying forward is not the tail. It is that all three problems were solved by drawing the range and looking, rather than reasoning about what should work — I had the surface normal's sign backwards and would have shipped flat-lying spikes if I had trusted the derivation.