The circle frame, five ways

Four rings at 1.000 / 0.705 / 0.644 / 0.362, offsets as measured. Picture r 0.362, sharing the inner ring’s centre.

Every circle sits where the mark puts it, at the mark’s own proportions, redrawn as hairlines. The picture fills the hole the inner gold ring encloses. It is the mark, with a photograph where the white is.

The picture is 36% of the outer radius, so it comes out at 153px inside a 440px shape. On a page head that means a 1,050px wide object to show a 380px photograph. Unusable at page scale, but it is the honest baseline every other variation is measured against.

Rings unchanged from variation 1. Picture r 0.644 on the night circle’s centre; inner gold ring painted over it.

Same four rings, same places. The picture moves out to the night circle, the largest ring that still reads as an enclosure, and the inner gold ring is drawn ON the photograph, crossing it exactly as it crosses the blue ring in the mark.

A gold hairline over a face is a decision that has to survive every photograph the site will ever use. It works on an architectural frame and it can look like a scratch on a portrait. The picture is still only 64% of the outer radius.

Gold r 48 at (49.6, 50). Night r 41 at (46, 50.5). Picture r 37 at (47, 47). Each contains the next with 0.4 to 7.6 units of clearance.

The mark’s rule is kept (each ring smaller and lower, never concentric) but the proportions are re-cut for a photograph: three rings instead of four, each just containing the next, so the gap between them is a crescent that thickens downward. The picture is 74% of the outer diameter.

It is no longer the mark, it is the mark’s grammar. Someone holding the logo next to it will see a family resemblance rather than a quotation. That is the trade for a picture three times the area of variation 1.

Picture r 39 centred. Gold r 44.5 at (47.5, 47.5). Night r 43 at (52, 52).

The page title circle as it stands, with one change: the two hairlines stop being concentric. Gold drifts up and left, night drifts down and right, so each gap is a crescent and the two crescents oppose each other.

The quietest of the five and the least like the mark. At a glance it reads as a circle with two rings; the offset is felt rather than seen. If the point is to look like the logo, this is not it. Iterated for picture size directly below.

Make the picture bigger; keep the offsets between the circles small. Two things were costing size. The first was free: the drawing above sits inside a 440px box without filling it, so the shape was 92 of a possible 98 units wide. Every iteration below is auto-fitted to the same footprint, which is why they can be compared honestly: identical outside diameter, different amounts of picture.

The second is the real constraint. With the picture at radius r and a ring at r + Δ drifting by d, the gap runs from Δ − d to Δ + d. The ring can only drift as far as its own clearance: at d = Δ it touches the picture, and past that it cuts across it. So a big picture and a big drift are the same budget spent twice. Small Δ is what buys size, and it caps the drift at the same time, which is exactly the direction asked for.

What the numbers say: refitting alone takes the picture from 343px to 366px. Halving the clearance takes it to 389px. Everything after that is worth 10px or less, so past roughly 0.88 the decision stops being about size and becomes about which arrangement looks right. The circles below all carry a 1.5px hairline; the gap figures are the real rendered distances at a 440px shape.

Picture 389px in a 440px shape, 0.88 of it. ring 1: drift 11px, gap 7px to 29px  ·  ring 2: drift 7px, gap 6px to 20px.

The arrangement above with both clearances cut roughly in half. Nothing changes conceptually: gold still drifts up and left, night down and right, and the two crescents still oppose each other. The picture gains 46px over the original drawing.

The crescents are now thin enough that at small sizes they will read as one slightly thick ring rather than two. It is the safe answer, not the interesting one.

Picture 383px in a 440px shape, 0.87 of it. ring 1: drift 11px, gap 6px to 28px  ·  ring 2: drift 11px, gap 6px to 28px.

Both rings given the SAME radius and equal, opposite drift. The two crescents become identical and mirror each other, and the rings cross at two points on the opposite diagonal, which is the one thing the mark itself does: in the logo the blue and night rings cross rather than nest.

6px less picture than 4b for a shape that is harder to describe in a build note. The symmetry is also the least logo-like thing here, because the mark's rings all fall the same way rather than opposing.

Picture 388px in a 440px shape, 0.88 of it. ring 1: drift 16px, gap 0px to 32px  ·  ring 2: drift 10px, gap 0px to 20px.

Each ring is offset by exactly its own clearance, so it touches the picture at one point and opens to twice the clearance on the other side. It is the largest drift available at this picture size, and the touch reads as deliberate in a way a 2px gap never does.

A hairline that meets the photograph's edge has to survive every photograph: against a light area the ring will appear to dissolve at the touch point. Worth checking against a pale image before it is chosen.

Picture 399px in a 440px shape, 0.91 of it. ring 1: drift 16px, gap 0px to 33px.

One ring instead of two. The largest picture available at this footprint, 399px, and the quietest possible frame: a photograph with a single gold hairline drifting off it.

It abandons the pair, which is what carried the resemblance to the mark. At this point the shape is a circular photograph with a decoration rather than anything anyone would connect to the logo.

Tangent at (50, 3). Every centre on x = 50 with cy = 3 + r. Gold r 47, night r 41, picture r 35, inner gold r 20.

Every circle, the picture included, is tangent at one point at the top, so they share an edge there and spread apart downward. It turns the mark’s drift into a rule that can be stated in one line and applied at any size, and it is the one variation whose idea matches the firm’s name: the equinox is the moment things align.

The alignment is only legible if the tangency point stays in the layout’s eyeline; rotate it and the shape looks accidental. The small gold ring sits on the photograph, so variation 2’s objection applies to it too.