Brand and press
Everything on this page is free to use when writing about Trace Commons. The assets are released for editorial and reference use — describing, linking to, or reporting on the project. They are not a licence to imply that Trace Commons endorses, partners with, or has reviewed something it has not.
Press contact: zaki@manian.org
Where the project actually is
Read this before writing the piece. A register has to exist before it can be opened, and right now a small invited cohort is building it. Open query access — the thing that makes the project matter — is not yet something a reader can go and exercise. Two surfaces are open to anyone today, with no invite or account: corpus analytics and the contributor leaderboard. Everything else is still a commitment rather than a capability.
We would rather you write that accurately than generously. A story describing Trace Commons as an open dataset available today would be wrong, and we would have to correct it.
Boilerplate
Three lengths, all accurate as of this page's last update. Use them as written or edit them — but if you edit, check the claims section below.
Trace Commons is a register of AI agent work, held under terms its contributors set.
Trace Commons is a register of AI agent work, held under terms its contributors set. Contributors capture and scrub the records their own agents produce on their own machines. Only the scrubbed envelope leaves, carrying a revocable consent scope that decides what any future query is permitted to do with it.
Trace Commons is a register of AI agent work, held under terms its contributors set. The record of how AI agents actually behave — the tool calls, the wrong turns, the specific failures — lands almost entirely in the logs of the companies that build them. Whoever can watch agents fail is the party best equipped to make them work better, audit them honestly, or build anything that competes. Contributors run Ironclaw locally to capture and scrub the records their own agents produce. Only the scrubbed envelope leaves the machine, carrying a consent scope that governs what any future query may do with it and that can be withdrawn. Two gates decide what is filed: whether a record is genuinely different from what the register already holds, and whether it is substantive work rather than template-shaped filler. A Trace Credit is the signed, on-chain record of an accepted submission. Credits are non-transferable.
What you can safely say
- Contributors set the terms of use for their own records, and those terms bind. A record's consent scope decides what any query may do with it, scopes are revocable, and this is enforced in the pipeline today.
- Corpus-level analytics stay open to everyone — no invite, no account, no payment.
- A Trace Credit is a signed, on-chain record that a submission was accepted. Credits are non-transferable.
- When buyers pay to query the register, that flows to contributors. Trace Commons is not a platform collecting rent on other people's work.
- Submissions pass two gates — one for whether a record differs meaningfully from what is already held, one for whether it is substantive rather than template-shaped.
What we don't claim
- No corpus size or contributor counts from us. Those numbers move. Pull them live from analytics and date them, rather than quoting a figure we gave you in an email.
- Not an open dataset. Contribution is invite-gated and query access is not yet open. "Open" describes the commitment and the public analytics, not present-day access to the records.
- No partner, customer, or funder names unless that party has said so themselves.
- No claims about individual contributors. The leaderboard shows only people who explicitly opted into public attribution; absence from it is not information about anyone.
- No safety or accuracy claims about the agents whose work is recorded. The register documents what agents did. It does not certify that any of it was correct.
Assets
The desktop clients don't load these files — they draw the mark from shared geometry so it stays exact at every size and follows the system appearance live. What is below is that same geometry exported for packaging and press.
Download everything (95 KB) — every logo below in SVG and PNG, light and dark.
Lockup
Mark and wordmark together. Use this one unless you have a reason not to.
Mark
The brackets in their frame — the app-icon treatment, and what ships on the Dock, the Start menu, and Linux software centres. Use it anywhere square.
Wordmark
The name alone, for places where the mark would be redundant or too small to read. Live text, so it renders in the reader's Helvetica rather than a frozen copy of ours.
Glyph
The brackets without their frame, for placing on a surface that already provides the field — a coloured tile, a card, an avatar crop.
Template stencil
Single ink, no frame, thicker stroke. This is the menu-bar and tray treatment: the host recolours it. Use it only where something else is doing the colouring.
Using the logo
The mark is two brackets — an opening bracket in the accent, a closing one in ink — held in a hairline frame. It is the same geometry the desktop clients draw, and it comes in two treatments that are not interchangeable. The mark is full colour and framed: app icons, Dock, Start menu, anywhere it stands on its own. The template stencil is frameless and single-ink, for menu bars and system trays where the host recolours it. Please don't use the stencil as a logo, and don't add a frame back onto the glyph.
- Clear space. Leave at least a quarter of the mark's height clear on every side. The lockup and wordmark files already carry that padding, so placing them flush is fine; the mark, glyph, and stencil files are trimmed to their own edges, so add it yourself.
- Minimum size. Mark: 16px — it is designed to hold at tray sizes. Wordmark: 100px wide. Lockup: 140px wide. Below that, set the name as plain text instead.
- Pick the right variant. Light files are for light backgrounds, dark files for dark ones. Both have transparent backgrounds.
Using the name
- Two words, both capitalised: Trace Commons. Not TraceCommons, not tracecommons. This site sets its headings in uppercase as a typographic treatment, which is why you will see TRACE COMMONS on the page — that is styling, not the name. In running text it is always Trace Commons.
- No article — "Trace Commons published", not "the Trace Commons published".
- Trace Credit is capitalised as a defined term. Lowercase "credits" is fine on second reference.
- Ironclaw is the local capture tool. One word, capital I. It is a separate project that Trace Commons depends on.
Colour
Black on white, one teal accent, and almost nothing else. The accent earns its place by being rare — it marks the thing you are meant to act on, so spreading it across a layout is the one way to get this palette wrong.
| Token | Value | Use |
|---|---|---|
| Ink | #000000 | Text, rules, the frame |
| Ground | #FFFFFF | Page background |
| Accent | #00D4AA | Links on hover, primary buttons |
| Accent bright | #00EF8B | Primary button hover only |
| Tint | #EAFAF5 | Notices, quiet panels |
| Muted | #6B6B6B | Secondary text, micro labels |
| Yellow | #F5C91F | The manifesto headline. Nothing else yet |
The mark uses the same palette
The mark is the desktop clients' artwork and it used to be green and blue, from the palette those clients use for status. It is not any more: the opening bracket is the accent above and everything else is ink, and the macOS, Windows and Linux clients moved with it, so the logo on this page is the logo in the product.
The accent is the same value in both schemes. It is deliberately not the only thing describing a shape — on white it is a low-contrast colour, so the ink frame and the closing bracket carry the form. That is why the frame matters and why you should not drop it, recolour it, or thin it.
| Element | Light | Dark | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Opening bracket | #00D4AA | #00D4AA | The accent, both schemes |
| Closing bracket | #000000 | #FFFFFF | Ink |
| Frame | #000000 | #FFFFFF | The hairline, two units |
| Field | #FFFFFF | #000000 | Inside the frame |
Type
The site is set in Helvetica Neue, falling back to Helvetica and Arial — headings in bold uppercase, tightly tracked. Anything a machine produced — trace IDs, hashes, ledger rows, counts — is set in monospace instead. That split is the rule rather than a decoration: machine output is always monospaced and prose never is, so a reader can tell them apart without being told.
The wordmark is the name set in that same Helvetica, bold and uppercase, tracked to match the headings. The supplied wordmark and lockup files carry it as live text rather than outlines — the SVG names the font stack and contains no glyph data of its own. Two consequences worth knowing before you use them.
- Opened somewhere without Helvetica, the SVGs fall back to Arial, then to whatever the system offers. That is the site's own stack doing what it is meant to do, and the result is correct rather than broken.
- If you need pixels that cannot shift, use the supplied PNGs. They were rasterised in Helvetica Neue and are fixed.
If you can set live text, you do not need these files at all: set the name in Helvetica bold uppercase and you have the wordmark.
Licence
The logo files are the identity of the project: use them to refer to Trace Commons, not as part of your own logo, product name, or domain. The text on this page — boilerplate included — you may reproduce and edit freely. If you want to use the marks some other way, ask: zaki@manian.org.