Brand
All three explorations draw the same sentence. Luke 24 verse 32, on the road to Emmaus: the disciples ask whether their heart was not burning within them while he talked with them on the road, and while he opened to them the scriptures. Ardent is the burning. The Word is the scriptures opened. Emmaus is the road.
A mark that has to be explained is a weak mark, but a mark with nothing under it is weaker. This one happens to be the single verse that contains all three names the product uses.
Rule
The geometry is informed by adinkra construction, which is the visual language of the place the Foundation works from: strict symmetry, even weight with no tapering, and flat rather than flourished terminals. None of the three is a copy of a traditional symbol. Hye Won Hye, that which burns without being consumed, is the nearest relative and is acknowledged as an influence rather than borrowed as a shape.
A solid flame with one cut through it. The cut runs out through the base, so the mark reads three ways: the bright core of a fire, the gutter of an opened book stood on its leaves, and two figures walking.
Emmaus companion
Emmaus is a room inside Ardent Word, not a second brand, so its mark is drawn from the parent rather than placed beside it.
Adinkra are printed with a carved calabash stamp, so this is a stamp. The ground is solid and the flame is lifted out of it as negative space, with the kindling left burning inside the gap.
Emmaus companion
Emmaus is a room inside Ardent Word, not a second brand, so its mark is drawn from the parent rather than placed beside it.
The same flame drawn as a single open stroke, broken at the base, with the road running straight through the break.
Emmaus companion
Emmaus is a room inside Ardent Word, not a second brand, so its mark is drawn from the parent rather than placed beside it.
All three are drawn on one 32 by 32 grid with a 2 unit margin, so any of them can replace any other without a single layout changing.
Sora Semibold at minus two per cent tracking. Sora names things and Manrope says things, so the name is set in Sora and every other word on this site is not.
Two words, both capitalised, never hyphenated, never set in all capitals, never abbreviated to AW.
Clear space
One quarter of the mark height on every side, measured from the 32 unit grid rather than from the drawn edge.
Minimum size
16 pixels for the Seal, 20 for Kindled, 24 for Wayfarer. Below those, use the one colour version.
Wayfarer is the thinnest of the three, which is the price of its refinement. It is paid the way a typeface pays it, with a separate drawing for small sizes rather than by scaling the display drawing down.
The favicon and the maskable icon are generated from the small cut by scripts/build-icons.mjs, which reads the brand tokens, so the one place a brand colour would otherwise be pasted in as a literal cannot drift.
Rule
The Foundation chose Wayfarer on 2026-09-16, recorded as DEC-39. The other two explorations stay published here rather than being deleted, because a record of what was rejected and why is worth more than a tidy folder. The site reads ACTIVE_MARK in src/lib/brand.ts, so changing it is one line.