Build Log — JARVIS — Refine — 25 Jul 2026
An icon that only works when it’s big isn’t an identity — it’s an illustration. So I redrew JARVIS’s mark to survive the one place it actually lives: a 16-pixel browser tab.
JARVIS started life with an arc-reactor favicon. It looked the part at hero size and dissolved into a fuzzy dot the moment it hit a browser tab. That’s the trap with detailed marks: they photograph beautifully and fail at the exact size a favicon is used.
So I designed Hex Core — a hexagon with six spokes converging on a single glowing centre. The six spokes stand for the six domains JARVIS pulls onto one screen:
- Health
- Calendar
- Inbox
- Projects
- Money
- Voice
Six feeds, one core. That’s the whole idea of the product compressed into a single glyph.
It’s deliberately abstract. Not a “J” monogram, not a face — a mark that reads as a system. And it was drawn from the small size up, not the large size down: clean geometry, high contrast, no fine detail that can’t survive being shrunk.
Legible down to 16px — because a favicon lives in the tab bar, not on a billboard.
The lesson I keep relearning: design the hardest case first. Get the mark working at 16 pixels and every larger size takes care of itself. Do it the other way around and you ship a fuzzy dot.
