Three candidate families for the mark that replaces the lucide sparkle and the chat spinner — one glyph, two states: crisp at rest, a living orb while the AI thinks. Every specimen below is real inline SVG, animated in CSS only.
A referent is the thing a word points at. The mark is that idea drawn literally: a fixed point, one long north ray, and a reference tick reading its bearing along an orbit arc — an instrument marker, not a star. While thinking, the point itself becomes the orb and the tick sweeps the arc like a needle taking a measurement.
Thinking: the point swells into a breathing orb (4.8 s breath), rays recede to 40%, the tick sweeps ±26° along the arc on a 9.6 s period — two breaths per sweep, so the whole figure feels like one slow instrument. Settle: everything returns in 220 ms ease-out; the orb crisps back into the point.
Blurred, the sparkle collapses into a soft diamond; A stays a dot-with-a-spike and an off-axis arc. No shared silhouette.
Gold flatters the orb (the #ffe19b nucleus glows like the CTA border) but promotes an ambient indicator into an accent — see the color recommendation below.
The section sign is the one glyph that means law in every typeface — redrawn here as two open curls completing each other through a single point. That point is the glyph's counter and its heart: at rest a crisp dot, while thinking the orb breathes inside the § — the law, thinking.
Thinking: the glyph holds perfectly still at 55% while the counter breathes — the quietest of the three treatments; all life is interior. Settle: curls return to full weight and the orb condenses back to the dot in 220 ms.
Zero sparkle risk — the failure mode is different: blurred small, it can read as an "S" or a swirl rather than a §.
Gold § is the most dangerous combination on the page — it is one step from the "serif + gold legal" cliché the brand explicitly rejects.
The shipped 8-ray loader, promoted from spinner to mark: seven rays of deliberately unequal length around an orb core, longest at north, a quiet gap at south-west — asymmetry is what separates a mark from a loading glyph. While thinking the core undulates and a slow wave of light travels the rays; nothing rotates.
Thinking: the core breathes while a luminous wave circles the rays once per 4.8 s breath (opacity only — deliberately unlike the current spinner's rotation). Settle: the wave stops, every ray restores to full, the orb crisps — 220 ms.
The honest weakness: blurred, both become radiant points. The unequal rays and the south-west gap are the entire margin of difference.
Gold rays read as a sun/burst — the most "award badge" of the six gold cells. If C wins, it should stay monochrome without exception.
Each family inline as the thinking indicator, with the refreshed phased status text (the ~7 s escalation mechanic is unchanged — only the words). Chips switch between the three candidate wording sets; the demo cycles phases every few seconds.
Closest to the current wording. Zero drama, zero jargon — the senior-paralegal register from PRODUCT.md, verbatim. Safe with any family.
Names real paralegal verbs, implying method without claiming pipeline stages we don't stream yet. Pairs naturally with A (referencing) and B (citation).
Leans into the "reference volume" brand story. "Authorities" is lovely for lawyers but the most forward claim of the three — phase 2 implies legal research is happening.
Family A — the reference point — in monochrome currentColor, with Family C as runner-up.
Why A: it is the only family that scores on every Success Criterion at once — unmistakably distinct from the sparkle at a squint, legible at 16 px with one detail-floor caveat (the tick), calm and instrument-precise in motion, and it carries the product's actual name: a referent is a point being referred to. B loses at 16 px and flirts with the legaltech cliché the brand constitution forbids; C is the safe evolution but stakes its identity on animation and stays within squinting distance of the sparkle family.
Color:
stay monochrome. The mark is chrome — it inherits currentColor
like every other icon, so it obeys the One-Gold Rule (gold belongs to the primary CTA
alone). The gold specimens above are attractive precisely because they borrow CTA
equity; spending that on an ambient indicator that appears dozens of times a day would
cheapen both. Revisit gold only for marketing surfaces, outside this scope.
CSS fidelity: at the sizes this mark will ever render (15–88 px), the layered radial-gradient orb with breath + nucleus drift was judged against the shader-orb reference (viewed off-page; the specimens above are the CSS side of that comparison) — the shader's extra turbulence only reads above ~120 px. No canvas exception to R5 is warranted.
| State | What moves | Duration / easing |
|---|---|---|
| Static | Nothing. Crisp point, rays, arc, tick at rest. | — |
| Thinking · breath | Orb halo scales 1 → 1.26; nucleus drifts ±0.5 px with ±6% scale. | 4.8s ease-in-out infinite / nucleus 7.2s |
| Thinking · sweep | Reference tick rotates ±26° about the point, along the arc. | 9.6s ease-in-out infinite — two breaths per sweep |
| Thinking · chrome | Rays fade to 40%, arc to 55% (opacity only). | 220ms cubic-bezier(0.16,1,0.3,1) |
| Settle | Orb → point, rays/arc/tick restore; loops stop. | 220ms cubic-bezier(0.16,1,0.3,1) |
| Reduced motion | Static mark only; phased text carries state (R7). Text loses shimmer, keeps phases. | — |
| Phased text | Three phases, wording Set 2 ("The file"), escalate then hold. | 7000ms per phase (unchanged) |
Open before implementation planning: license check on the thinking-orbs repository and Appllama gallery is moot for code (nothing here is ported — motion language only) but should be recorded as such in the plan · confirm the 16 px tick renders ≥2 px on 1× displays, else thicken to 2.25 stroke at the smallest size · re-audit AI-semantic surfaces (chat, inbox scan, insight generation) before the R8/R9 swap.