Brand standard · October 2026
The drawing grammar
Twenty-seven rules, from a black square to a winking G. They come from two painters in one art school: Vitebsk, 1919.
Malevich had reduced painting to flat forms on a white field; his Black Square was first shown in Petrograd in 1915 (Tate). In Vitebsk, where both taught, Lissitzky took those floating shapes and gave them depth, drawing them in axonometry rather than as flat planes of color (MoMA). He called the result a Proun, usually read as a Russian abbreviation for “project for the affirmation of the new” (Cleveland), and described each one as a station between painting and architecture.
Our Proun plates, our technical drawings, our small animations and our marks all follow the same grammar. Each rule says whose it is: Malevich’s or Lissitzky’s own words, in English translation; a museum’s reading of their work; or ours. Every use of it on a screen is ours, derived from them: no source talks about interfaces.
I · The field
Malevich started from nothing but a form and the field it sits on.
- 01 · The field is spaceLeave the ground open. It is part of the pictureMalevich glossed his first Suprematist image as “the square = feeling, the white field = the void beyond this feeling” (The Non-Objective World, 1927). Lissitzky read Suprematism as taking the white for the color of space itself (1925). So our cream field is never leftover background to be filled: no ground line, no boxes, no texture. Forms sit in space, and the space is doing work.
- 02 · Lines move, squares restWhat moves is a line or a plane. What holds is a square or a blockMalevich split his work in two: “dynamic Suprematism of the plane,” whose added element is the straight line, dynamic in character, and “static Suprematism in space,” an abstract architecture, whose element is the square (The Non-Objective World). We keep the two registers apart. In an animation the moving part is a bar or a plane, like the turning bar in GOOD; what stays still is square, like the red hinge. Structure in a technical drawing is drawn in blocks.
- 03 · Economy decidesFewest parts, fewest frames, and each one workingIn On New Systems in Art (Vitebsk, 1919) Malevich called the black square an economic plane and named economy a “fifth dimension” by which every creative invention should be judged, a turn from ornament to the simple, economic expression of energy (as read by Ičin, 2019). For us: every stroke in a drawing, every part in a plate and every frame in an animation must carry information or do work. If it does neither, it goes.
- 04 · Solids are plainVolumes are blocks about an axis, in plain light and one screenMalevich’s Arkhitektons are three-dimensional developments of his painting, utopian models in which “the cube becomes the fundamental Suprematist element” (Centre Pompidou). They were white plaster, and survive mostly as reconstructions from the original pieces. So our volumes are plain blocks stacked around a main axis: field-colored tops, a line screen for the side in shade, solid ink for the side away from the light. No gradients, no texture, no rendering.
II · Plane to volume
Lissitzky took Malevich’s planes and gave them depth.
- 05 · A plane becomes a volumeGive a flat idea depth before you show itLissitzky began the Prouns in 1919 in Vitebsk, where Malevich also taught. Instead of depicting two-dimensional planes of color, as Malevich did, he used axonometric projection, which gave the forms virtual architectural space (MoMA). We do the same: an idea starts as a flat sign, and we draw it as a volume when we want it to read as something that could be made.
- 06 · No vanishing pointParallel lines stay parallelPerspective gives a picture one viewpoint and one axis running to the horizon. Lissitzky’s 1920 theses set against it “a host of projective axes,” imparted to the Proun by motion. Axonometry keeps true measure in every direction, so a Proun and a technical drawing can share a sheet, and a dimension on either can be trusted.
- 07 · Each thing its own angleOne sheet can hold more than one way of lookingIn Proun 1 C (1919) each element is rendered from a different angle of vision (Thyssen-Bornemisza). In a Proun illustration we may set a plan beside an axonometric beside an elevation, so each part is seen the way it explains best. A technical drawing keeps to one projection per view and labels each view, so the reader always knows which way they are looking.
- 08 · No fixed topTurn the sheet and build on what is thereLissitzky would draw a form, turn the sheet ninety degrees and add a volume that fit the new orientation, so the viewer keeps choosing which way is up; Yve-Alain Bois called it radical reversibility (MoMA). For us it is a working method as much as a look: we build on what a client already has, from a new side, and a composition should still hold when it is turned.
III · Drawing what could be built
A Proun was a station on the way to building. So is every drawing we make.
- 09 · Between drawing and buildingDraw everything as if it could be madeLissitzky called the Proun a station, in one translation “the interchange station between painting and architecture” (Cleveland; V&A). In 1923 he built one: the Proun Room in Berlin, a space you walk through, known now only from reconstructions (Tate). Our Proun plates are ideas drawn as if they could stand up; our technical drawings are things that did.
- 10 · Objects are drawn, ideas are builtA real thing gets a plain drawing. An idea gets a ProunThe split is ours, and it follows from 09. A painting, a yard, a record player or a pancake is drawn plainly, from its own measurements or photographs, never decorated into a Proun. A process, a promise or a comparison has no body, so we build it one from slabs and bars. One figure never mixes the two.
- 11 · The construction stays onLeave the lines that built it, in purpleThis one is ours, from drafting rather than from the Prouns: no museum source we could verify makes visible construction a Proun rule. Center lines, set-out circles and dimensions stay on the drawing in purple, so a reader can check the work. It is our trait Rigorous, drawn: prices that show their working.
- 12 · Traced from the real thingA technical drawing starts from evidence, never from memoryOurs. A drawing of a real object is traced or measured from that object: a photograph, a capture frame, the county’s parcel lines, a spec sheet. No hand-placed curves standing in for a shape we didn’t look at, and no tracing of someone else’s stock image. The Prouns are inventions; our technical drawings are testimony.
IV · Motion
Things turn, and come together, and can always be stopped.
- 13 · Walk around itMotion moves the viewer around the work, not through itA Proun “is no longer a picture and becomes a building that must be viewed (by moving around its outside) from all angles” (Thyssen-Bornemisza). In the 1920 theses: “Revolving, we are screwed into space.” So our motion orbits and turns about a center. It never zooms the reader through a scene or flies a camera at them.
- 14 · Motion makes the formA turning part can draw a shape that lasts while it turnsIn “K. und Pangeometrie” (1925) Lissitzky describes a body set rotating that makes “a new expression of space, which is there for as long as the movement lasts.” GOOD’s screened O is exactly this: a disc drawn by its turning bar. When the motion stops, the part is still a whole, honest shape on its own.
- 15 · Assembly, not arrivalParts come in along their own lines and lock into placeA Proun was made by adding a volume, turning, adding again. Our plates build the same way, one part at a time along its construction line, and the word GOOD comes out of the G a letter at a time. Nothing fades in from nowhere: every part can be traced to where it came from. The red arrives last, beside the one thing to do.
- 16 · Settle, never bounce · anything can stopEase into rest, and leave the reader in chargeThese two are ours, not Lissitzky’s. A part that bounces pretends to weigh something, and the Prouns are weightless; so motion eases and settles. And anything that moves for more than five seconds can be paused, as WCAG 2.2.2 asks; anyone who asks their device for less motion sees the finished frame. The G spins and winks once, then rests.
V · Black, one red, and the marks
A square on a wall, a book set from the type case, and our one red.
- 17 · One emblem, where attention goesThe mark appears once, in the place given to itAt 0,10 in 1915 Black Square hung across the top corner of the room, the place where Russian homes keep their icons, and some viewers called it blasphemy (Tate, a curator’s reading of the installation). Our G gets one honored place per page too: it signs the very end, centered, after everything it endorses. It never repeats as decoration, and it never leads.
- 18 · Ink, and one redDraw in ink. Spend the red once, beside the one thing to doLissitzky printed For the Voice (1923) in black and red, built, he said, “with the resources of the compositor’s type case alone” (Minneapolis Institute of Art). Our drawings are ink on the field. The red is the hinge: one square, in one place, beside the one action we ask of the reader. A plate with two reds has two asks, and one of them is lying.
- 19 · Letters are builtOur word is assembled from the same parts as our drawingsFor the Voice was composed from type-case material rather than drawn lettering (Mia), and at Vitebsk Lissitzky led the collective almanac UNOVIS No. 1, the first of his books built as a visual whole (Tretyakov Gallery Magazine). GOOD is built, not typed: the G adapter, a square with a hole cut after Lissitzky’s About Two Squares (1922), a screened disc and the bar that draws it, a D, and the hinge.
- 20 · A color never works aloneEvery signal color carries a shape or a word as wellOurs, from the color research rather than from the Prouns. A color reserved for one meaning is found at a glance (Christ, 1975; Treisman and Gelade, 1980), but meaning carried by color alone fails people who see color differently (WCAG 1.4.1): our hinge red and green look alike to the most common kind. So each signal keeps a fixed second channel, and the deeper magenta, blue and green shown here are proposals that pass contrast on the field.
VI · Room for what we already make
The site’s other styles, each given the rule it answers to.
- 21 · Evidence keeps its own lookPhotographs, screenshots, video and logos stay as they areA photograph of a painting, a screenshot of a site or a vendor’s logo is testimony, so we never redraw it in our style. We frame it with our apparatus instead: a hairline slab, purple numbered pins, Mono notes, a true-scale baseline. This extends rule 12 from drawings to every kind of evidence.
- 22 · Color that is the subject stays trueWhen the color is the point, draw the real colorRule 18 keeps us to ink and one red, except where color is what the figure is about: a color-vision plate, a yellowed lens, the trials’ seven gate colors, an FDA nutrition panel. Those keep their true colors, and the hinge still marks the one thing to do. Logos shown as evidence go gray, so a brand’s color never reads as one of our signals.
- 23 · An argument can stay flatVolume is for things that could be built. Reasoning stays on the planeOur story figures, timelines, provenance spine, scope diagram and device story are flat: hairlines, Mono, Archivo for the things themselves, one red. That is Malevich’s register, the plane, set beside Lissitzky’s volume (rules 02 and 05). A figure that argues stays flat. A figure that shows something that could be made gets depth.
- 24 · Short forms go wordlessBeside a short form, the drawing carries no wordsNext to a “Try it” box, a trait or a proof column, the words are already on the page. The drawing beside them shows the comparison by motion or by form alone: something switches, rises, empties or fills. Labels belong to the long figures, where the drawing has to stand on its own (rule 03, economy).
- 25 · The red prints two waysOn the marks, two inks overprinted. In drawings, one flat redThe site prints the hinge two ways. On the G, in GOOD and on Proun plates it is magenta over yellow, slightly off register, as a two-color press would print it (Lissitzky printed For the Voice in two colors, rule 18). In technical drawings, scenes and the 404 it is one flat red. Both are the same hinge, so a figure uses one or the other, never both.
- 26 · A print homage, onceThe golden riso poster stays, for the essay about print and ratioThe Lattice opens on a poster: crop and registration marks, a Fibonacci ruler, a seed head, the golden spiral. It speaks the grammar of the print shop rather than the Proun, and it is right for an essay about how proportion was set on paper. One page, one poster. The older flat riso plates in the code are retired, not revived.
- 27 · Tools look like toolsOur instruments wear our type and inks. The page they test keeps its ownThe bookmarklet panel, the experiment arenas and the fovea renderer are working instruments: house fonts, ink and field, square edges, one accent. The page under them, whether a real site or our deliberately ordinary bakery sample, is never restyled to match. You test the world as it is.
What we don’t claim
Black Square is dated 1913 on the canvas, but it was first shown, and probably painted, in 1915. Hanging it in the corner where icons go is a curator’s reading, not Malevich’s stated intent. Lissitzky never spelled out what “Proun” stands for, and his phrase is translated three ways: “interchange,” “changing” and “shunting” station. The economy passage needs checking against Troels Andersen’s English edition of Malevich’s essays before we quote it.
Sources
Article
Five Ways to Look at Malevich’s Black SquareTate
Book
The Non-Objective World·
Bauhaus book 11; English translation, 1959
Peer-reviewed study
Economics as the Fifth Dimension: Malevich’s Dialogue with Marx·
Slavica Tergestina 22
Reference
Architecton Gota, [1923]/1978Collection record
Article
The Many Lives of El Lissitzky’s Proun 19D·
MoMA magazine
Article
PROUN: Theses, 1920·
In translation, reprinted by The Charnel House
Reference
Proun 1 C, 1919Collection record
Reference
First Kestner Portfolio Proun, 1923Collection record 1995.3
Reference
El Lissitzky, ProunCollection record
Article
Replicas and Reconstructions in Twentieth-Century ArtTate Papers no. 8
Article
K. und Pangeometrie·
Europa-Almanach; in translation, reprinted by The Charnel House
Reference
Dlya golosa (For the Voice), 1923Collection record
Article
El Lissitzky in VitebskTretyakov Gallery Magazine
Standard
Understanding 2.2.2: Pause, Stop, HideWCAG 2.2
Peer-reviewed study
Review and analysis of color coding research for visual displays·
Human Factors 17(6)
Standard
Understanding 1.4.1: Use of ColorWCAG 2.2