Totality

Study 07-totality for Dreavo Studios. Created 2026-11-15.

Idea

Dreavo means to dream. Totality is the moment of a solar eclipse when the moon closes over the sun: the sky shuts its eye, the day goes dark, and a ring of light hangs where the sun was. That is where the dream begins, and it is also what a cinema does when the lights go down. In this logo the eclipse is not a picture placed above the name: the last letter is the eclipse. DREAV is set in wide, sleek geometric caps and the name closes on an eclipsed disc, a ring that runs hair-thin around one side and swells into a bright crescent on the other. Read as a word it is DREAVO; read alone, the O is the mark.

One sentence: the name ends in an eclipse, so the O of Dreavo is the moment the sky closes its eye and the dream begins.

Why it fits

• Positioning (studio weight from an independent). An eclipse is the one natural event that stops everyone; it carries scale without chrome, searchlights, or heritage symbols. The logo itself stays a quiet wordmark; the scale lives in the event it names.
• Personality. Serious, not grim: darkness with light at its edge, not horror. Epic, not bombastic: the epic part is a single crescent, not rays or flares. Quiet, not anonymous: a stock sans with one letter you can point at.
• Principles leaned on hardest. 1 (survives in one flat color: the eclipse is a shape, a disc minus an offset disc, not a glow), 4 (one drawn feature you can name: "the O is an eclipse"), and 2 (the O alone is a round mark built for the circular avatar).
• The user's own reference. The user loves references/eclipse-reference.jpg (a thin ember eclipse arc over wide caps) and the eclipse logo that came before it. Totality keeps their eclipse and their lettering style but moves the eclipse into the name, so it is no longer a decoration floating above it.

Logo type and track

• Type: wordmark with an integrated symbol. The O is drawn by hand and doubles as the mark; STUDIOS sits under the name, small and widely tracked.
• Track: svg. The idea is exact geometry (two circles, one offset), which is best built by hand; the lettering is outlined from Montserrat with bun lf outline.
• Ground: dark. An eclipse happens on a black sky, the title card is the logo's largest use, and the user's reference is near-black. primary-alt.svg covers light print.
• Reference: references/eclipse-reference.jpg. Preserved from it: near-black ground, bone caps that are wide and geometric, an ember-colored eclipse that is thin on one side and bright on the other. Not carried over: the arc floating above the word (owned by 01-eclipse) and the glow (it moves to the key visuals).

Form notes

• Pitch sketch: research/pitches/totality.png (variants A, B, C). The user picked the direction and asked for "ember versions": the ember crescent is the primary look.
• Construction: the O is an outer circle minus an inner circle offset toward the dark side, filled even-odd. The offset sets the ratio of crescent to hairline. The O overshoots the cap height slightly, as a round letter must.
• Lettering: Montserrat caps, wide and geometric, outlined and respaced by eye against the O.
• Stage 4 choice: crescent form B from the pitch (the bright crescent facing forward, on the horizontal axis), picked over A (crescent upper right) in logo/concepts/compare-01.png and compare-02.png. At 120 px the A form read as a slanted bold O; B read as a ring with a crescent, which is the eclipse. B is also symmetric top to bottom like D and E. Runner-up: A at -25°, which echoes the reference's light but loses the eclipse reading at small size.
• Final geometry: Montserrat 500 caps (stem 20 units on a 140 cap), the crossbar-less A kept because it opens the AV pair toward the O and keeps the reference's lettering. The O is 148 units tall (4 units overshoot), ring 8 units on the dark side and 40 on the crescent: weights run 0.4 : 1 : 2 against the stem. STUDIOS is Montserrat 600 at 28% scale so its stems hold at small sizes. mark.svg is the same eclipse drawn heavier (11 and 40 units) for 16 to 64 px use.
• Color: Eclipse Black ground, Bone letters, the crescent in an ember ramp: Rust on the dim side of the ring, Ember through the middle, Corona at the peak of the crescent where the diamond ring flashes. Flat versions carry the same shape in one color.

Risks

• Reads as a bold O or a C instead of an eclipse. Guard: the crescent's stress runs on a diagonal no typeface O has, the ring always closes (a C is open), and the ember color sits only on the O. The key visuals show the real eclipse so the reading is learned.
• The thin side vanishes at small sizes and the O turns into a C. Guard: a minimum ring thickness in the lockup and a separate, heavier ring for mark.svg, which is the version used at avatar and favicon sizes.
• Too close to 01-eclipse. Both come from the same reference. Guard: no arc above the name; the eclipse is a letter, and the mark is a closed ring rather than an open arc over ΛV.
• Cliché. A crescent can read as a moon or a sunrise logo. Guard: the closed ring and the near-black ground make it an eclipse, and nothing else (stars, rays, flares) appears in the logo.

Deviations

None

Sign-off

Approved by the user on 2026-11-15 from the pitch sketch. Note: "ember versions".

Study 07-totality. Version 1, 2026-11-15.

Overview

Dreavo means to dream. Totality is the moment of a solar eclipse when the sky closes its eye and the dream begins, and in this identity that moment is a letter: the name ends in an eclipse. DREAV is set in wide geometric caps, and the O is an eclipsed disc, a ring hair-thin on one side that swells into a bright ember crescent on the other.

Personality: serious, not grim; epic, not bombastic; classic, not nostalgic; quiet, not anonymous.

This document is for anyone who places the logo or builds with the system: designers, printers, web developers, editors cutting the ident, and the people running social accounts. The system meets the five design principles in strategy.md:

1. Survives in one flat color. The eclipse is a shape (a disc minus an offset disc), so mono-black.svg and mono-white.svg carry the whole idea. The ember gradient is finish, not structure.
2. Holds in a billing block and a round avatar. wordmark.svg holds at 160 px wide. mark.svg is drawn heavier for small sizes and keeps its hairline side at 32 px inside a circle.
3. No stock cinema and no levity. No reels, lenses, stars or flares. The only image is an eclipse.
4. One drawn feature you can name. "The O is an eclipse."
5. Two elements, one weight logic. The name and STUDIOS only. The ring's thin side, the letter stem and the crescent's peak run 8 : 20 : 40 units (0.4 : 1 : 2).

Logo

Versions

For billing blocks, use wordmark.svg recolored in one flat color: black (as in mono-black.svg) on light posters, white (as in mono-white.svg) on dark ones.

Construction

• Lettering. D, R, E, V and STUDIOS are outlined from Montserrat (OFL) with bun lf outline at a 140-unit cap height. DREAV is Montserrat 500 (stem 20 units). STUDIOS is Montserrat 600 at 28% scale, tracked +900/1000 and centered under the full width of DREAVO; it sits one weight heavier so its stems hold at small sizes. Its top is 52 units below the baseline.
• The A is drawn without a crossbar: Montserrat 500's V flipped top to bottom. Its right leg runs parallel to the V's left arm, 30 units apart, measured horizontally at the cap line.
• Spacing, set optically at the cap line, between the closest ink: D–R 22, R–E 30, E–Λ 16 (the open diagonal needs less), Λ–V 30 parallel, V–O 6 (the round O and the V's open bottom both add space).
• The O. An outer circle of radius 74 (148 tall, overshooting the cap line and the baseline by 4 units each) minus an inner circle of radius 50. The inner circle, the moon, is shifted 16 units toward the left, so the ring is 8 units on the left and 40 at the crescent's peak on the right. It is filled even-odd. The crescent's axis is horizontal, so the O is symmetric top to bottom like the D and E.
• Color. In primary.svg the crescent's linear gradient (gradientUnits="userSpaceOnUse") runs along the horizontal axis from the outer edge of the thin side to the crescent's peak: Rust #A8431A at 0, Ember #D9652B at 0.6, Corona #F4C99B at 1. In primary-alt.svg it runs Rust at 0 to Ember at 1. The mono files are flat.
• Files. All paths are absolute coordinates: no transforms, masks, clips, filters or text. They are generated by logo/concepts/build.ts final.

Clear space

X = the crescent's width at its peak: 40 units, which is 2 letter stems or 0.29 of the cap height.

• Keep 2X clear on every side of primary.svg, primary-alt.svg, the mono files and wordmark.svg, measured from the outermost ink (the O's overshoot on the right, the ends of STUDIOS at the bottom).
• Keep 1X clear around mark.svg, which is 27% of the disc's diameter. In avatar and app-icon tiles the disc fills at most 60% of the tile.
• Intrusions: other logos, text, rules, image edges and busy image detail, folds, trim edges and the edge of the screen.

Minimum size

Smallest-detail formula from factory/craft/wordmark-craft.md:

Below 210 px, use wordmark.svg. Below 160 px, use mark.svg, and set the name in type next to it if the audience may not know the brand. The contact sheet shows the primary at 120 px wide only as a check: STUDIOS fills in there, which is why the 210 px rule exists.

Misuse

• Do not use the heavy mark.svg ring as the O in the name, and do not put the lockup's fine O in an avatar.
• Do not open the ring: the thin side always closes the circle. An open ring is a C.
• Do not rotate the crescent. The peak faces right, on the horizontal axis, in every file.
• Do not color the letters ember or put the gradient on DREAV or STUDIOS. Ember belongs only to the O.
• Do not reverse the gradient (bright on the thin side) or use palette colors outside the Rust–Ember–Corona ramp in it.
• Do not add a glow, corona, shadow, bevel or lens flare to the logo files. The corona lives in key visuals, built as artwork around the logo, never baked into it.
• Do not place primary.svg on Paper or other light grounds; use primary-alt.svg.
• Do not add a crossbar to the A, rebuild the name in live Montserrat, or respace the letters.
• Do not stretch, skew or outline the logo, and do not move STUDIOS (left-aligned, larger, above).
• Do not set the full-color logo over bright or busy image areas. Darken the area to Eclipse Black at 70% or more, or use mono-white.svg.

Color

Proportions: Eclipse Black about 65%, Umbra 20%, Bone 12%, and the ember ramp (Rust, Ember, Corona together) 3% or less, except in key visuals, where the eclipse may carry more light.

Approved pairings (WCAG contrast):

Never pair: Corona on Paper (1.3:1), Bone on Paper (1.1:1), Rust as text on Eclipse Black, Ember text under 24 px on Paper.

Typography

No italics are used.

Hierarchy:

• Headline: Montserrat 500, caps, 32 to 72 px, tracking +160/1000, line height 1.1, Bone.
• Label or role line: Montserrat 600, caps, 11 to 14 px, tracking +300/1000, Ember or Bone at 50% opacity.
• Subhead: Geist 300, sentence case, 22 to 28 px, line height 1.35, Bone.
• Body: Geist 400, 15 to 18 px, line height 1.5, Bone at 85% on Eclipse Black, Eclipse Black on Paper.
• Caption: Geist 400, 12 to 13 px, Bone at 55%.

Imagery and key visuals

• Subject. Darkness with light at its edge: the eclipse itself, night exteriors, a face lit from one side, a lit window in a dark building. One light source per image, ideally from the right, as on the crescent.
• Grading. Blacks crushed to Eclipse Black, highlights warm (Ember to Corona), no cool or teal grades, low saturation everywhere except the light source. Fine grain is allowed, at 5 to 8% opacity.
• The eclipse device. Key visuals may scale the logo's exact eclipse geometry (outer radius 74, inner radius 50 shifted 16 toward the dark side, so the ring runs 8 to 40) to any size and build the real event around it: corona, atmosphere, the diamond-ring bead at the crescent's peak, made with gradients and blur. Never distort its proportions, and keep the moon's edge sharp.
• Effects. Glow, gradients, blur and grain are allowed in key visuals, title cards and motion only. Never on the logo files or around the logo in documents.
• Logo on images. The logo appears once per image, crisp, at 15 to 25% of the frame width, on an area at least as dark as Eclipse Black at 70%. On bright photography use mono-white.svg over a darkened area. The corona may sit behind the logo's O in title cards, at low intensity, as in the title card below.

Voice

Dreavo writes like a title sequence: names, verbs, facts, short declarative sentences in the present tense. No exclamation marks, superlatives or filler. Totality adds one register: darkness and beginnings, said plainly, never mystically.

• Do: "Every film begins in the dark." Don't: "Prepare to be transported to a world of dreams!"
• Do: "Now in production." Don't: "We're thrilled to announce our most ambitious project yet."
• Do: "Dreavo Studios presents a film by Ana Ruiz." Don't: "Your premium partner for cinematic content."

Example lines:

• Headline: "EVERY FILM BEGINS IN THE DARK"
• Button label: "View the slate"
• Social post: "Principal photography wraps today. In cinemas 12 March."

Applications

• The O becomes a real eclipse: the logo's exact geometry scaled up with corona, bead and atmosphere, and the flat logo crisp beneath it once.
• A 2:3 one-sheet: a photographic plate graded toward Eclipse Black with warm highlights, "DREAVO STUDIOS PRESENTS" in Montserrat 600 at the top, the title in Montserrat 500 caps, "A film by" in Geist 300, a credits block in Montserrat 600 with the role words at 0.63 size, and primary.svg at the foot at 260 px wide, above its 210 px minimum. The plate is darkened toward the foot so the credits and logo sit on near-black.
• The ident on Eclipse Black: primary.svg at 28% of the frame width, a quiet corona behind the O, nothing else in frame.
• mark.svg at 60% of a circular crop on Eclipse Black, holding from the profile size down to 32 px in a feed.
• 85 × 55 mm. Front: the primary lockup on Eclipse Black stock, with 2X clear space at least. Back: Umbra stock, the mark at 6 mm or more, the name in Montserrat 500 caps, the role in Montserrat 600 Ember, contact lines in Geist 400.