The Shadow Clock Films title card: a beam of light across the name, from off screen at the lower left

The Mark

A shadow clock, in one gesture

The name. One light. The angle of the putter.

In 1912 Lucy Richards cast the bronze that stands by the practice green: a boy, a long putter, and a sundial. The shaft is the gnomon; the shadow it throws is the time. Our name comes from that dial, and from another in a family garden, and the mark comes from both.

Light is projected across the name from somewhere you can't see, low and from the left, at the angle of the boy's putter. The letters it reaches stand in the light. The ones it doesn't have gone the color bronze turns: the patina on every old dial. The sundial is the angle and the edge. The film is the beam.

And the word is the lamp. A strip of film forms out of the mist behind FILMS, faint under the F and whole by the S, then runs along the baseline, narrowing into the dark off the right edge, the sprocket holes letting the house show through.

The Specimens

The title card at 16 by 9, with the production line — The Title Card · 16 × 9

The mark on Ink for paper: SHADOW in the tans, the sprockets in the mist — On Paper · Ink

The mark on Page for paper: the name, the sprockets in the mist — On Paper · Page

The Ingredients

Face Jupiter, Canada Type's cut of the inscriptional Roman on every engraved dial, set in capitals and tracked like the hours
Light Page, lamp-warm, never white
Shade the patina, where the light doesn't reach
House Ink
Angle the putter's, from the lower left, the source off screen
Strip on screen, patina, forming out of the mist behind the word, whole by the S, receding off the right edge; on paper, the sprockets alone, nearly gray, in the mist

Ink · the house

Page · the light

Patina · the shade

Patina · the air

Sand · the sub line

The Book

How the house is kept

One mark, one palette, one face for the name. Everything below follows from the card above.

These are the standing rules for anything that carries the name: the site, the deck, the stationery, a title card, a press still, a letter. Where a page needs something the rules don't cover, the rule is restraint.

The Name

Shadow Clock Films

Write Shadow Clock Films, three words, each capitalized, in running text
Write Shadow Clock Films LLC on a legal line, a contract, the copyright, nowhere else
Write A Shadow Clock Films Production on a title card and in the credits
Write Pinehurst, North Carolina, spelled out, beneath the name when a place is given

Never SCF, Shadow Clock, or the Clock in public
Never the name in capitals in running text; capitals belong to the mark alone
Never a possessive on the name, Shadow Clock Films' slate; write the slate of Shadow Clock Films
Never an exclamation point anywhere the name appears

The Versions

Two cuts, three treatments

The mark is the name in Jupiter with the sprockets receding from the S. On screen it is the title card, lit. On paper it is stacked or one line, on Page or on Ink, and in one color for an emboss, a stamp, or a fax. The mark is placed, never typed: every version lives as a file.

Stacked, on Page — Stacked · On Page · letters, poster, cover

Stacked, reversed on Ink — Stacked · Reversed · the dark house, the deck

Stacked, one color — Stacked · One Color · emboss, stamp, fax

One line, on Page — One Line · On Page · letterhead, a card, a footer

One line, reversed on Ink — One Line · Reversed · the bar of the site

One line, one color — One Line · One Color · a form, a label

Screen the title card, 16 × 9 or 32 × 9, with or without the Production line; the hero on the site; the portrait cut on a phone
Paper the SVG with the misted sprockets for a printer; the Vector twin, with hard-edged holes, for an engraver or an embosser
Stacked when the mark stands alone: a cover, a poster, the head of a letter of consequence
One line when the mark sits in a row: a letterhead, a card, a bar, a footer, a line of partner marks

Space and Size

Room to breathe

Clear space · one S on every side

Clear space the cap height of the S, on every side, measured from the letters, not the sprockets; nothing enters it, no type, no rule, no edge of a photograph
Smallest, one line 1.25 inches wide on paper, 180 pixels on screen
Smallest, stacked 0.75 inch wide on paper, 110 pixels on screen
Below that the name alone, set in Jupiter, no sprockets; a favicon is the S
The sprockets run off the right; give them the room, and let them leave the page or the frame when they reach it

Never

What the mark is not

Not tilted. The angle belongs to the beam, not the name.

Not stretched. The proportions are the file's.

Not shadowed, outlined, or glowed. The lamp lives on the title card and nowhere on paper.

Never the beam drawn on paper; on paper the mark is flat and the sprockets alone say film
Never the strip filled in or outlined; the holes carry it
Never the mark over a photograph except on the Ink house, where the card itself is the ground
Never the name retyped in another face, tracked tighter, or set in lowercase
Never a second mark beside it: a tagline, a monogram, an icon, a seal

Color

One job a color

The green is the screen's; the tans are paper's. Ink is the black, pure black is never used; Page is the light, white is never used. Nothing on a public page is Vermilion.

InkThe house. The black of every reading role.#111111

PageThe light. The paper, and the lit letters.#FCFAF7

Patina, the shadeWhere the light doesn't reach. SHADOW on paper.#2F5257

Patina, the airThe beam's dust, the strip on screen.#5A878C

SandEvery rule on paper. The sub line. Labels on Ink.#BFAE99

Label TanEvery tracked capital on Page.#8A7862

KeylineA keyline round a photograph. Hairlines on Ink.#6B5844

MistThe sprockets on Ink. Hairlines inside a table.#C4B9AE

Warm GrayNotes, the legend, the sprockets on Page.#8C8377

BandA box on Page.#F0ECE7

Screen the house is Ink; type is Page, labels Sand, hairlines Keyline, links the air
Paper the house is Page; type is Ink, labels Label Tan, rules Sand at a half point
Print the hex values above are the screen's; a press run matches each to a spot color from a drawdown, approved before the run
Stock the card is Sand, uncoated, heavy; the letterhead is Page, uncoated; nothing glossy

Type

Three faces, each with one job

Face	Job	Specimen
Jupiter Pro Regular	The name, and only the name. Capitals, tracked ten percent of the size, lines at 0.92 of the size. Owned outright; never typed, always placed from a file.
EB Garamond	Titling: a page title, a heading, the one serif line on a page. Regular only, never tracked.	A shadow clock, in one gesture
Helvetica Now Display Black	The display line: the one bold sentence under a title. Figures in a deck.	The name. One light. The angle of the putter.
Helvetica Now Text Light	Everything read. 16 on 25 on screen, 11 on 16 in a letter, 9 on 11.25 on a deck page.	Light is projected across the name from somewhere you can't see.
Helvetica Now Text, capitals	Every label, caption, table head, and the sub line: 11 pixels, tracked 0.14 em, Label Tan on Page, Sand on Ink.	The Specimens · On Paper · Ink
Helvetica Now Text Medium	The first word of a list line, a name, a lead.	Face Jupiter, the inscriptional Roman

Scale on screen, the title 40 on 44, a section title 28 on 32, a heading 21 on 25, the body 16 on 25, a note 13 on 19, a label 11 on 16; on a phone the title 32 on 36
Measure 680 pixels for reading, 1080 for the page; a letter's measure 5.4 inches
Lists line by line with no glyphs, each line in the same grammatical form, the first word Medium, lines grouped by their lead word
Case MLA title case for every header and label; sentence case for the display line
Floor nothing under 6 points on paper, nothing under 10 pixels on screen
Fallback Helvetica Now is licensed and self-hosted; a document that leaves the house goes as a PDF with the fonts embedded, never as HTML

The Rules

A rule closes the section above it

Paper every rule is Sand at a half point, a stroked line, never a filled rectangle and never a border; hairlines inside a table are Mist at the same weight
Screen the rule is film: it rises from nothing at the left, runs solid through the middle, and dissolves into two rails of sprocket holes at film pitch over the last third, in Mist, softened, with a halo
Where a rule is the bottom of the section above, never the top of the one below; one before a section that changes subject, none between kin
Borders hairlines and rare: a keyline on a photograph, nothing else; no boxes, no cards, no drop shadows, square corners everywhere

Air 88 pixels above a rule and 80 below on screen; on paper a rule sits 6 points under what it closes
Charts no gridlines, no outlines, no arrows a row of blocks already shows; one fill carries the meaning and everyone else is Mist
Photographs full width or in a grid of three; a quarter-point Keyline on paper, a hairline on screen
Pages the content pops, the design recedes; remove anything that carries no information

Photographs

Pinehurst, in the first light and the last

No. 10 in the morning, by Chris Auman — No. 10, in the morning · Photograph · Chris Auman

Who Chris Auman's stills are the house's photographs; a frame from anyone else is credited the same way
When dawn and dusk, fog and low sun, the long shadow; never noon, never a flash
What the ground, the pines, the sand, the light on the village; people in the frame are small and unposed, or absent
Frame 3 : 2, cropped only at the edges; no filters, no vignettes, no black and white unless the archive is
Credit a caption in capitals, Label Tan, beneath or at the corner: the place, a middle dot, Photograph, a middle dot, the name
Archive the historic photographs carry the drama; they are shown whole, keylined, dated when the date is known, and never colorized

The Web

How a page is built

HouseThe dark house: every page on Ink so the title card has no bottom edge; type Page, labels Sand, hairlines Keyline, links the air
HeroThe title card at 56 percent of the screen, then one photograph at full width; on a phone the portrait card at two thirds of the screen
BarThe one-line mark reversed at the left, the sections as capitals at the right; 64 pixels tall, sticky; on a phone a Menu button and a left-aligned column on the right half
PageOne page: the picture, the lens, the team, the name, contact, the foot; The Mark as the second page; nothing else until there is something to say
Width1080 pixels for the page, 680 for reading, 24-pixel gutters; the hero and the photographs run edge to edge
SwitchesEvery feature sits behind a switch in js/config.js; a feature ships off and is flipped on, never edited in
FontsHelvetica Now and EB Garamond self-hosted as WOFF2, swapped in; the mark is an image, so Jupiter never ships
ImagesJPEG at quality 92 for photographs and cards, at 1x and 2x; SVG for the marks; nothing over 700 kilobytes; every image link stamped with a version
ShareEvery page carries its own 1920 × 1080 image: the home page the name over Pinehurst, The Mark the title card
IconsThe S alone, on Ink, as favicon and touch icon
MotionNone on the page yet; when the mark animates it plays once, four seconds, and never loops
SearchNoindex on the test site; open at shadowclockfilms.com with a sitemap of two pages
CachePages served fresh; everything else by its version stamp
NothingNo cookie banner, no analytics until there is a reason, no pop-ups, no carousel, no social icons, no chat

Paper

Letters, cards, decks

Letterhead US Letter; the one-line mark at the head, an inch and a tenth from the left; the body an inch below it, Text Light 11 on 16 on a 5.4-inch measure; the house line and the address at the foot under a Sand hairline; a continuation sheet carries the foot alone
Card 3.5 × 2 inches on Sand stock, the name in Ink, the sprockets in the mist, a Warm Gray hairline; the Green card, the beam on Ink, is its screen twin and never printed
Deck 16 × 9; the title card as cover, Page for the inner pages, the Deeper divider on Ink; Garamond titles, Helvetica Now 13 on 19, the one-line mark at the foot

PDF opens Single Page, Fit Page; author Frank M. Jernigan, Matt West second; the agreed title and keywords in the metadata; fonts embedded; designed for the screen and for color print alike
Versions every file is Name v000.000; the current version at the top of its folder, everything older in _archive beside it
Files the marks, the stationery, and the generators that cut them live together in the Style folder; nothing is redrawn by hand

Voice

Short, and sure of itself

Lead with the bottom line; the ask and what the reader gets before the argument
Write short sentences, active verbs, few prepositions; cut anything that stands on ceremony
Keep an elevated register and a plain vocabulary; never apologetic, never breathless, never an exclamation point
Say a picture, a film; the company makes films and the name says so, so the copy never has to

Name people by what they did: Directed by, Screenplay by, Story by, Produced by; no superlatives in a credit
Claim nothing that can't be shown; an absolute waits for its source
Treat race as a descriptor only where it matters to the story
Close without a flourish; the last line is a fact

The Motion

The house goes dark. The beam reaches across from the wings. The letters catch the light as it arrives, FILMS last. Then the strip runs out of the word and off the edge, frame by frame. Four seconds, no sound but the projector.

The mark locked October 25, 2026. The book, the same night.