DHAHAB · ذهب · The Golden Standard
The lion mark
One mark for everything I ship — the site, the apps, the products, the clothing label. It is drawn by a program, not by hand, so a change to the geometry reaches every surface on the next build.
01 · Why
King, sword, gold — in one figure.
My clothing label is KXNG SEF: king, plus سيف — Arabic for sword, and the nickname I have had since childhood. My studio is DHAHAB: ذهب, gold. A lion's mane is the one figure that carries both without needing a word in either language. It also survives being shrunk: at 16 pixels a monogram turns to mush, but a mane silhouette is still a mane.
02 · Construction
Three decisions do all the work.
Everything is generated from one Python file. These are the parts that took the most iterations to get right — and the failure mode each one prevents.
The mane hangs
Shard length is a function of angle — cropped over the brow, heaviest at the jaw, with two low harmonics for an organic outline. A constant radius does not read as a lion. It reads as a sun.
The shards vary
Lengths carry a deterministic jitter. Identical petals at even spacing read as a flower, not a mane — same reason a hand-drawn mane is never symmetrical.
The muzzle falls
A philtrum line under the nose and lobes that drop away. Lift those lobe ends by a few units and the whole mark turns into a smiley face. This is the single most fragile detail in the design.
03 · Colour
Gold on black, or ink on bone.
No third colourway. The gradient runs light to dark, top to bottom, and never rotates.
04 · Variants
Four marks, one geometry.
Pick by surface, not by taste. Every file below is an SVG you can open and inspect.
05 · Lockups
Mark plus wordmark.
The canvas sizes itself to the word, so a long name never overflows its own artboard.
06 · Scale
It has to work at favicon size.
Below 24px, switch to the tile — the loose shards blur into a blob without a container.
07 · Rules
Five, and they are not negotiable.
- Two colourways only. Gold on black, or ink on bone. Never a third.
- Clear space of one ear-width — about 12% of the mark — on every side.
- 24px minimum for the master mark, 16px for the tile. Below that, use the tile.
- Never recolour individual shards, add an outline, stretch it unevenly, or drop it on a busy photo.
- On garments the lion takes the gold only when it is the largest graphic with no competing hero word. Beside a giant word, it prints bone like any other supporting element — the same one-hero-element rule the crown follows, with no carve-out.
08 · The kit
Everything, in one download.
Every SVG variant, both lockup sets, the profile avatars, the header banners, and a one-page rules file.
inset so a circular crop never clips the mane
for light-mode profiles and print directories
lower-left kept clear for the profile photo
The mark is my identity — use it to refer to me or my work, not as your own brand.
09 · Where it lives
One generator, every surface.
The apps
TradeLog, Cut and Fire carry the mark in-app and as their installed home-screen icon.
Open the apps →KXNG SEF
A print file at full garment resolution, with the face knocked out so bare fabric reads through instead of ink.
See the label →The products
Every PDF cover in the store is stamped with the same mark from the same source file.
Browse the store →