Rebrands usually begin with taste. Ours began with a pixel sampler.
The oldest files Eyenus owns are two wallpapers from 2005 — a glossy green eye
on a graphite gradient, drawn with the tools and confidence of that decade.
Before deciding anything, we measured them. The mark's green on the dark
wallpaper resolves to #76e00e. Not approximately; exactly. That number went
into the heritage record before a single new line was drawn.
Then came the decision that shaped the whole color system: we didn't change it.
The identity green on dark surfaces — the token color.brand.signal — is the
measured 2005 lime, untouched. Every other color in the system derives from it
mathematically: the green ramp holds the anchor's hue at 135.21 degrees in
OKLCH and walks a perceptual lightness ladder; the graphite neutrals carry four
percent of its chroma, so even our darkest surface remembers the eye. Pure
black and pure gray do not exist in the system.
What does provenance buy? Three things.
First, an answer. Every brand guideline says "use the green." Ours can say why this green — because it is the one the company has owned since 2005, recovered by measurement, with the derivation script in the repository. A competitor can copy the hex; they cannot copy the reason.
Second, a constraint. When the ramp needed a contrast fix during release hardening, we could not simply nudge values by eye — the derivation is deterministic and documented, so the fix had to happen in the method, in the open, with the test suite watching. Provenance makes drift loud.
Third, a story that is also true. "We didn't change the green; we changed everything around it" is not copywriting that was later justified. It is a commit history.
The gloss went. The gradients went. The descriptor went. The green stayed, and it turned out the green was the brand.