Clear Space

The number in a clear space diagram is the logo measuring itself

Almost every brand book has a page with the logo on it and some space drawn around it. The number in that space is rarely a millimetre.

It is usually the logo measuring itself: the height of the whole mark, the height of one letter in the wordmark, the width of one stroke of it.

The reason is not tradition. A mark gets drawn at every size a brand ever works at, from a favicon to the side of a building. A millimetre that is right on a letterhead is invisible on a van. A multiple of the mark's own height is right at both, because the mark shrinks and the space shrinks with it.

What the form asks for

One number: how many mark-heights of clear space.

Two is a lot of air, and it is not an unusual answer for a brand that likes room. Anything from a tenth to ten is accepted.

The field arrives empty and the save waits until you answer it. There is no starting number and no greyed-out suggestion, because the rule is stored with your name and the date on it, and a number you never read should not carry your name.

The picture on the row draws your actual mark with that zone around it: a boundary, a squared corner in each of the four corners marked with the multiple, and the mark's own height measured out to the side so you can see what the multiple is a multiple of. The mark and its zone are drawn to fit the frame, so what you are reading is the proportion rather than a measurement of your file. That is the point. The proportion is the rule, and it is the same at every size.

Picking the number

If your book already states one, transcribe it. That is the whole job, and the next section covers the one case where transcribing takes a conversion first.

Before you rule anything, the picture is drawn at one mark-height and says so, so you can see what one looks like against your own mark before you decide. It is a legend rather than a recommendation: the product does not have one, and nothing is stored until you type a number.

Below a half the rule is doing very little work, because the space it protects is smaller than anything anyone would notice being lost. Above two, check the picture rather than the arithmetic: a zone that generous starts to decide your layouts for you, which may be exactly what you want.

If your book states a letterform instead

This is the common case and it takes a conversion, once.

The rule stores one thing: a multiple of the mark's full height. If your book states the space in terms of a letterform, work out what that letterform is as a fraction of the mark's full height and type that instead. A capital that is two thirds of the logo's height, kept clear once on each side, is a multiple of two thirds, so you type 0.67. Half of an icon that is the full height of the mark is 0.5. A stroke width that is a fifth of the mark's height, kept clear twice over, is 0.4.

Do the arithmetic once, then write what you did in the note beside the rule so the next person knows where the number came from. The note travels with the ruling. Converted this way the rule holds at every size exactly as the original does, because both are proportions of the same thing.

There is no second unit and no separate number for print and screen. One number, one anchor. If your book halves its exclusion zone on screen, you have two rules and this field can hold one of them, so pick the one that governs the work you make most of and say so in the note.

If you have no logo uploaded yet

The picture falls back to your brand's initials, set in your own display face, and says so underneath. There is a link under it that takes you to where a primary logo goes.

Those initials are not a placeholder drawn for the picture's benefit. They are what an agent making something for you would be handed today, resolved exactly the way an agent resolves it. There is no third fallback and nothing invents a shape: a drawn mark standing in for yours would put a rule around a logo that does not exist.

It also changes what the rule can do. A rule stated in mark-heights has exactly one dependency and it is the mark. Once the product knows this brand has no logo uploaded, the row reports it rather than badging the rule as fine: there is no height for the rule to be a multiple of, so every artefact keeps its air around initials taken from the brand's name, at whatever size somebody drew them.

One distinction worth knowing: this only fires once somebody has established that the brand has no mark. If nobody has looked, nothing is claimed either way and the rule keeps its sentence. A storage hiccup must not become a report that your brand has no logo.

What the rule does after you save it

It is recorded with your name and the date against it, and it reaches everyone building with your brand as one sentence: nothing sits closer to the mark than this much, on any side.

The sentence is generated from the number rather than typed by anybody, so the rule and its description cannot come apart. Change the number and the sentence changes with it, in the product and in the file, because both come from the same place.

It is an instruction rather than an inspection. Nothing in Sidenote opens a finished piece and tells you the mark is crowded. What the rule buys you is that the person or the agent making the thing is told the answer instead of guessing it, which is where crowded marks come from in the first place.

If you have nothing written down

Then there is one decision and the picture makes it for you faster than any reasoning will.

Type 1, look at your own mark with a mark-height of air around it, and ask whether you would let a headline sit at that boundary. If yes, rule it. If the mark looks stranded, come down. If a headline at the boundary still feels like crowding, go up. You are not calibrating against a standard, you are deciding how much room your mark needs, and the only instrument for that is your own eye on your own mark.

Then write the note. The reason you picked a number is the thing nobody can reconstruct later, and the field for it is right there.

The other rules

Clear space is the rule that is already a proportion, so it needs no translating. Grid and margins is where that idea is set out in full, and it is worth reading first if you have not. Type hierarchy is the third rule on the card.

One thing clear space does not do: it does not set your page margin. That is a separate rule with its own anchor, and a book that uses its clear space as the page margin is stating two rules that happen to agree, not one rule.