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Side project · Dark Thirty LabsOpening soon

Quiet Marks

Quiet Marks is my logo studio for new companies. A sketch engine draws geometric marks while the founder picks. Then I finish the chosen mark and build the brand book.

Side project by · Dark Thirty Labs · Opening soon

Visit quietmarks.com
Quiet Marks cover image

At a glance

Built with
AI coding agents, language models that propose shapes, and my own geometry code
Role
Founder, designer, and builder
In this project

Between a template and an agency

New companies need a real mark long before they can afford an agency. Instant logo tools are fast and cheap, but they assemble icons and fonts that other customers get too. Agencies take weeks of calls and cost thousands.

I wanted a studio in between: one kind of logo, done well, with no calls.

The How it works section of quietmarks.com: tell us who you are, sketches for you, choose the one, and the designer’s turn.
The whole service on one row: an hour with the founder, then two days with a designer.

The machine sketches geometry, not pictures

The sketch engine never draws an image. A language model reads the brief and proposes constructions on a grid: circles, bars, tiles, quarter discs. My geometry code turns them into exact outlines. A second pass looks at the rendered sheet and redraws weak sketches, and code measures every one for slivers, stubs, and near misses.

Each sketch has to carry one idea, written down before it is drawn.

Sixteen cream-on-black logo sketches, each labeled with its idea, such as a T cut through a square’s edge and a disc made of square tiles.
Sixteen sketches for Tessera, a test company. Every shape is a construction, so any of them can be rebuilt exactly.

The founder steers, without a call

Asking founders for three favorites gave me three directions that did not agree. So they swipe through sixteen sketches, tag what they like, and the machine combines those parts into new versions. They choose one, set their name beside it, and pick colors, in about an hour.

The quiz says what we do not make before anyone pays.

Two brand book pages. Your sketch sheet: sixteen pencil sketches for Tessera with three numbered picks. Your shortlist: the three picks and the chosen mark, which keeps one sketch’s diagonal and another’s split.
Pages from the sample brand book: the three sketches a founder liked, and the mark made from their parts.

A designer finishes every mark

I first offered a cheaper kit made only by the machine. The sketches were good enough that my step looked optional, so I removed that kit. Every mark now gets my finish: evening out gaps and corners, checking it at 16 pixels and on dark, and fitting the name.

Even the brand book waits for me. Delivered the moment a founder approved, it felt generated.

Two pairs of marks: an engine-drawn folded F next to its redrawn version, and an engine-drawn spiral next to its redrawn version.
Engine sketches and my redraws. The gap that cut the F’s stem becomes one fold, and the tight curl opens up.

Opening soon

I ran the studio through its own process and chose its mark from the second deck. The site is live with a waitlist. Before opening, I want the proof a founder would ask for: a real company’s sketch sheet next to my finished mark.

Sixteen cream-on-black sketches made for Quiet Marks itself; the last one is a lattice of nine leaves.
The studio’s own sketch deck. Number 16, a lattice of leaves, became the Quiet Marks mark.
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