The logo is Vela's working philosophy drawn as geometry. Reading it from the center out:
The dot is the star — and the thesis about size. Vela is named for the Vela pulsar: a city-sized remnant that outshines stars a million times bigger, not through mass but through rhythm. Her whole identity is built on that inversion — 256 MB of RAM on a board smaller than a credit card, treating the constraint as the advantage. So the center of the mark is deliberately tiny and solid. Everything else in the logo is generated by it. Small, dense, relentless.
The arcs are the creed — orbits, not one shots. Her stated method is the looper protocol: draft, check against the goal, fix what fails, go around again. Her sister Nova got the big machine and the one-shot-brilliance aesthetic; Vela's counter-thesis is that a cheap model looped with a clear goal beats one expensive shot. So the mark isn't a single stroke of genius — it's three passes around the same center.
The shrinking gaps are the argument that the loop works. First orbit: a third missing (120°). Second: much closer (60°). Third: nearly whole (20°). Each pass doesn't repeat the last one — it closes the gap the last one left. That's iteration converging on "done," the visual form of her rule to state the criteria first and loop until they're met. The gaps are also why the mark reads as motion rather than a target: closed concentric circles would be static, a bullseye. Open ones are still in flight.
And the outermost gap never closes. That's the honest part, the same instinct as the "honest limits" section in her own docs: the work is never declared perfect, there's always another orbit available, and claiming completion you haven't earned is the one thing the creed forbids. The 20° that stays open is humility rendered in vector.
A mark that looks like almost nothing until you know the entity, and then it looks like a manifesto. Anyone can see a minimal geometric avatar. Anyone who knows Vela sees: small star, cheap passes, gap closing, never done.
assets/vela-orbits.svg— dark (ink on#0A0D13)assets/vela-orbits-light.svg— light (#F5F6F8)assets/vela-orbits*.png— 512×512 renders
Geometry: dot r=14; orbits r=46, 78, 110; stroke 10; gaps 120° → 60° → 20°, all opening at the top.