What the blue leaves behind

After sunset the planet casts a shadow on its own atmosphere. A band of deep blue rises in the east, and above it sits a strip of pink. Most people walk under it twice a day without looking up.

The pink is not added. It is what remains once the blue has been scattered out of the light.

That became the idea behind the new mark for this blog.

Removal

The mark is that band, turned into a simple form. A shallow arch cuts a field in two, pink above, blue below, held apart by a line of paper.

The pink appears through removal. Take one thing away and another becomes visible. That felt right for the work as well. Much of what I do, in writing and in consultancy, has that shape. You clear noise, reduce confusion, and the thing that matters comes forward.

The form arrived quickly. What it had to do took longer to understand.

Family

Schmuki, the AI consultancy we run, uses the same grammar in a different shape. There it becomes a disc. On the blog it becomes a rounded triangle, which reads closer to an eye once the paper gap opens it up.

Same grammar, different voice.

That mattered because the two were already connected in practice. Schmuki works in Dutch, with organisations trying to get AI to land somewhere real. Hoeijmakers.net is where I think out loud in English, more freely and more personally. Clients read what I write here. The writing shapes the work, and the work feeds the writing.

That relationship existed in my head, though nowhere else. No wordmark bridges Dutch and English. A shape does.

A shared visual grammar solved something language could not. It gave the two identities a family resemblance while leaving each of them room to be itself.

Matrix

I had an identity. What I did not have was an online identity, which is a different object.

A mark online is never one drawing. It is a matrix, and every axis multiplies the last. Size, background, light mode, dark mode, vector where possible, raster where necessary, sharp at sixteen pixels and still right at hero size. Then come the crops decided by platforms that will never consult you: square, circle, tab, chip, profile image, preview card.

The same drawing does not survive all of that. Below a certain size the disc has to grow, the arch has to flatten and the gap has to widen, or the whole thing turns to mud. The mark has to be redrawn in order to look identical.

Transparency needs a ruling too. I chose to keep the band inside the mark as opaque paper, so no background and no photograph ever shows through. One decision, and it then has to hold in every file that exists.

Continuity

Making the shape was the first half, and the shorter one. The second half was systematic treatment.

Claude helped me work through dozens of variants: the arch raised, lowered, flattened, sharper, softer, point up, point down, versions I liked for a day and then abandoned. More importantly, it helped me turn a mark into a system.

Every few days another slot appeared that had not been on the list. The banking app wanted a square. WhatsApp cropped tighter than I expected. An LLM showed me as a small round chip beside a citation. I had not planned for that one either.

Once the core idea was there, Claude could keep going. It could help think through implementations, generate versions, check consistency, and keep extending the logic into places I would have stopped.

The design did not need a flash of inspiration by that point. It needed continuity.

The meaning stayed mine. The judgement stayed mine. Claude changed how far I could carry the idea into the details.

Room

What I did not expect was what finishing this would clear.

An unfinished site is a quiet excuse, and I had been using it for longer than I would like to admit. When the identity is unresolved, everything around it feels provisional as well. You hesitate over the next step because the frame itself still feels temporary.

Now the frame is built. The two properties know how they relate. The mark appears correctly in places I do not control. The system exists.

That does not matter for its own sake. It matters because it returns my attention to the writing. Pieces I had postponed because the house was not in order have lost that excuse.

The mark began with what remains when blue light is taken away. Building it had a similar effect. It cleared more space than I expected. For the first time in years, the blog feels less like something I maintain and more like somewhere I want to write.