HM3 — round two: serif and shutter
What carried forward. Four options survived round one: the wordmark direction 3.13 and the three colourways 2.10, 2.11 and 2.12. No platinum option was chosen, so the cool grey accent is gone from this round entirely and every panel below is red or steel.
What is new. Four serif faces and a camera shutter drawn as real geometry, each shown across all three surviving colourways. The colourways are fixed, so the only variable on this page is form.
Licensing. Every face here is a macOS system font. Fine for choosing, not licensed for web embedding, so whichever wins has to be bought. Cabinet Grotesk and Switzer remain the only faces already paid for.
0The selected wordmark, in vector
3.13 is a generated image, so it cannot ship. These are the two closest faces available in real outlines, shown in the three colourways that survived. Everything below varies from here.
Futura Bold
vector reading of the selected wordmarkHelvetica Neue Bold
vector reading of the selected wordmarkASerif
Four serifs, each shown as the exponent mark and as the chip mark, in all three surviving colourways. Every face is normalised to one cap height.
Didot Bold
Monotype licence neededThe sharpest contrast available. Hairlines against heavy stems give the mark the editorial authority that forty years of trading earns, and the red numeral sits on it like a masthead rule.
Risk. Those hairlines are the thinnest thing in the whole system. At 24px they break, and knocked out of moving footage they disappear entirely, so this face needs a separate low-contrast cut drawn for small use.
Bodoni 72 Bold
Monotype licence neededThe same high-contrast argument as Didot with rounder ball terminals and a warmer, less clinical voice. It reads as a publisher rather than as a fashion house.
Risk. Ball terminals collect and blur before hairlines do, so the small-size problem arrives even earlier than Didot's, and the whole setting sits closer to a book jacket than to a television company.
Baskerville Bold
Monotype licence neededA transitional serif with moderate contrast and bracketed serifs. It holds its shape at sizes where the high-contrast faces have already given up, which makes it the safest serif here.
Risk. That safety is paid for in distinction, because Baskerville is the default serious serif of the last century, so the mark gains credibility and gains nothing anyone can point at as theirs.
American Typewriter Bold
Monotype licence neededA slab. Even stroke weight, square serifs, no contrast at all, which makes it the only serif in this set that survives one ink, small sizes and a broadcast overlay unchanged.
Risk. It carries a strong period smell, closer to a 1970s title card than to a growth partner selling on Amazon today, and slabs are heavily used by finance and logistics brands.
BCamera shutter
The shutter drawn as real geometry: six blades, a hexagonal aperture, one blade carrying the accent. Shown alone and locked up with both the serif and the geometric sans.
Shutter, alone
Six straight blades sweeping into a hexagonal aperture, one blade taking the accent. It argues from the equipment, it is rotationally symmetrical so it holds any crop, and the single coloured blade gives the palette somewhere to live that is not the numeral.
Risk. It carries no HM3 in it, so it can never appear without the wordmark until the company is famous enough to skip its own name. The seams also close up below about 28px, which the 16px column shows.
Shutter with Didot
The serif and the shutter together: heritage in the letterforms, the medium in the mark. This is the closest thing here to a complete identity rather than a wordmark.
Risk. Two ideas competing for the same eye. The shutter is circular and busy, the Didot is fine and quiet, and at small sizes the shutter wins and the name loses.
Shutter with Futura
Here the shutter meets the geometric sans, which is the vector reading of the wordmark direction that survived selection. Both halves are built from circles and straight lines, so they share a construction logic the serif pairing does not.
Risk. Futura's wide round forms make this the longest lockup in the set, and a geometric sans beside a geometric icon can read as one undifferentiated shape rather than as two elements.
CGenerated, same brief
Twelve concepts generated from a written brief locked to the surviving colourways. These are raster images and none can ship, but they widen the field past what the four available serif faces can produce.
6.1Serif, red numeral keep
High-contrast serif with the numeral in tally red. The cleanest execution of the plain serif idea.
Risk. Hairlines and a red numeral both weaken at small size, so the 24px version needs a heavier cut.
6.2Transitional serif maybe
Sturdier serif with more even stroke weight, and a warmer, more institutional voice.
Risk. A spurious inner stroke landed inside the M and reads as a fourth stem. That is fixable in redraw, but it means the letterforms here cannot be traced directly.
6.3Serif with red chip keep
Serif letters with the numeral reversed out of a solid red square. This is the Tally construction wearing the serif and the red at once, and it is the strongest thing in the round.
Risk. Its chip came back slightly wider than square, and thin serif strokes sit awkwardly against a hard geometric block, so the two halves need reconciling by hand.
6.4Serif on paper keep
The same serif on the light ground, proving 2.12 works with a serif and not only with the sans.
Risk. Red on off-white with black type is also the newspaper and discount-flyer palette, so the setting has to stay generous to avoid that read.
6.5Slab, steel maybe
A heavy slab with the numeral in steel blue. No stroke contrast, so it survives small sizes better than any other serif here.
Risk. Slab plus steel blue reads as logistics or finance rather than television, and the letterforms came back slightly irregular.
6.6Serif between rules maybe
The wordmark held between two hairline rules, which frames it the way a masthead does.
Risk. Hairline rules vanish first at small size, and a wordmark held between rules is the most common editorial logo shape there is.
6.7Shutter, red blade keep
Six blades, one of them red, drawn clean. It confirms the vector geometry at 5.5 by an entirely independent route.
Risk. No HM3 in it, so it cannot stand alone yet, and the blade seams close up small.
6.8Shutter with serif keep
Shutter and serif wordmark locked up horizontally. The most complete identity produced in either round: a symbol, a wordmark and the accent all doing separate jobs.
Risk. Visually the shutter is busier than the letterforms beside it, so at small sizes the icon dominates and the name recedes.
6.9Shutter holding the three keep
The numeral sits inside the aperture in red, so the symbol carries the name instead of merely accompanying it. Solves the standalone problem 6.7 has.
Risk. The blades came back curved and busy, and the numeral is small against them, so the aperture needs opening and the blade count possibly reducing.
6.10Shutter with geometric sans maybe
The steel colourway on a shutter beside the geometric sans, matching the wordmark direction that survived.
Risk. At this scale the shutter reads as a gear or a flower rather than a lens, and steel blue on the icon is markedly weaker than red on it.
6.11Shutter on paper keep
Red shutter, black serif, light ground. The print-native version of 6.8 and the most confident use of 2.12 in the round.
Risk. A solid red disc is a lot of colour for a light ground, so it will fight anything else on the page.
6.12Hexagonal shutter keep
The shutter reduced to six flat blades with no outer circle, giving a hexagonal silhouette and one red blade. The boldest and most reducible mark of the twelve.
Risk. Hexagons with an angular void sit close to several crypto and developer-tool marks, and the aperture is nearly closed here, so it reads more as a shape than as a lens.