One shape, two letters
Most monograms put initials inside a shape. This one is the shape — two of a hexagon's six edges already spell a T and a Z, so nothing had to be added. It only had to be noticed.
01It builds itself
This is what plays when the site opens. The T comes in from the left, the Z from the right, they meet on the edge they share — and then the four remaining walls draw themselves closed around both.
02Borrowed, not added
The T is the top edge, and the line dropping from the middle of it. The Z is that same top edge, the diagonal, and the bottom. They share a wall — which is the whole trick, and also the reason they cannot come apart. Pull the T out and a side of the hexagon leaves with it.
My initials, then, but not sitting inside a badge. They are load-bearing: take either letter away and the shape stops being a shape.
03Why a hexagon
Because hexagons are bestagons — and unusually for an internet slogan, that one is a theorem.
Of every way to divide a surface into equal cells, the hexagonal grid spends the least material on the walls between them. Pappus of Alexandria suspected it around 300 AD. Nobody managed to prove it until 1999. The bees did not wait.
Honeycomb, obviously. But also basalt columns, which crack into hexagons as the lava cools and contracts, and the compound eye. Very different problems, same answer — that is usually a sign the answer is about the geometry rather than about the bee.
There is a well-known way of arranging a system called hexagonal architecture: a core you protect, and a wall you are only allowed to cross at declared points. It is drawn as a hexagon for the same reason this mark is one — the shape is the rule.
Which is more or less my job description. A machine-learning platform is not one clever model — it is dozens of nearly identical pieces that have to tile together without leaving holes between them. So is a design system. So is a website that has to keep working after I have handed over the keys. The bees solved it first; I just liked the answer enough to put it on the door.
04Six sides, six habits
A hexagon needs all six of its walls — take one away and the rest fall in on each other. These are mine, and none of them is the part that gets dropped first when a deadline arrives.
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Ownership
Accounts in your name, the repository, the brand files. When the work is done you own all of it, and nothing about carrying on requires me to still be there.
Identity first
The mark, the palette and the type come before a single page is designed. A website carries a brand; doing it in the other order means doing it twice.
In the open
A preview link early, updated as the work happens. Nothing is a reveal — you will have seen the site a hundred times before anyone else sees it once.
Written first
A document before a line of code: what is being built, what it explicitly does not include, and what happens when that changes. Including the projects I say no to.
Production, not demo
It has to work on a Tuesday morning, for people who did not build it and will never read the notebook. That standard comes from the platform work, and it does not get relaxed for a website.
Measured
No number without a source, no claim I have not checked. The decisions are written down — including the ones that turned out to be wrong, which are usually the useful ones.
05Why any of this matters
It does not, much — it is a logo. But it took an embarrassing number of attempts to find, and it is the smallest honest example of how I prefer to work: look for the version where the pieces already fit, then remove everything that was only there to hold them together. What survives that tends to keep working without me.