How Sathi is made
The design decisions, walkable. Every screen here is the real shipped pieces with sample data — nothing is a picture of the app; it is the app, held still enough to look at.
Everything here is a first iteration, chosen for simplicity and relevance — and the page exists to be argued with. If something reads wrong to you, that reading is the feedback we want.
The mark, where you are
The logo is monochrome almost everywhere — black on paper, white at night. In the countries this thing belongs to, it wears that flag exactly. Nothing in between: no blends, no invented shades.
Belonging is two different things here. Nepal and Japan are where Sathi is from. India, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Fiji are where its name already lives: साथी, সাথী, ساتھی — companion — is one word, and it was never ours alone.
Two of those flags already hold a circle at their centre — India's chakra, Bangladesh's red disc — and together they fly over more than one and a half billion people. The mark lands on both without translation. That overlap is relevance, not coincidence.
Nepal — साथी
blue arms, crimson eye
Japan — サティ
crimson eye, the Hinomaru
India — साथी
saffron over green, chakra navy
Bangladesh — সাথী
green arms, red disc
Pakistan — ساتھی
Pakistan green, throughout
Fiji — साथी
Fiji sky, throughout
Everywhere else — Sathi
monochrome — black on paper, white at night
The eye is each flag’s centre — Japan’s disc, Nepal’s crimson field inside its blue border, India’s chakra between the bands, Bangladesh’s red on green — so the mark maps onto a flag’s own geometry instead of borrowing its colours. These are shown on paper, at the exact hues, because a swatch that changed with your theme would be no swatch. In the app at night, a hue that cannot survive a near-black page steps back to plain white rather than becoming a lighter version of itself: Nepal’s blue and India’s navy do; Japan’s crimson and Bangladesh’s green never have to. Which country you see is read from your connection, on our own machine, and the mark is finished either way — monochrome is the design, not a logo waiting to load.
Pakistan and Fiji wear one colour throughout, because their flags have no coloured centre — Pakistan’s middle is a white crescent and star, Fiji’s is a sky-blue field. Painting the whole mark in the one national colour is truer than inventing a centre that isn’t there, and the mark still reads: the gap between the arms and the eye does that work, not a second hue.
Which countries, and why those: a language that carries the word is official there. That is a line we can check, and it is the reason Fiji is on this list — Fiji Hindi has been an official language since 2013, and sāthī is ordinary vocabulary in it. It is also the reason the list stops where it does. The word travels with people far past these six, but “everywhere its speakers live” is eventually every country, and a mark that belongs everywhere belongs nowhere in particular.
The design language
Four choices carry everything else. These are the ones that won — the arguments they beat are archived at the bottom.
One shape, every scale
Sathi is the same thing at every size — person, family, company; the app, and the apps inside it, each an honest twin of its native counterpart. So the mark is a shape that is also the same at every size: a golden logarithmic spiral, r(θ) = φ^(2θ/π), which magnified by φ ≈ 1.618 lands exactly on itself. Familiar mathematics on purpose — the elegance should be recognised, not explained — and the reason it beat the rarer Euler spiral: elegance that lives in a transition dies in a favicon. Every frame of motion is a real spiral, never a tween of one.
the deciding argumentThe being and its tools
The centre disc is the being; the spirals are its tools. They animate apart — the disc is presence (idle, listening, thinking), the spirals are capability (fetching, playing, writing) — and they are drawn apart on purpose. An assistant's mind and its instruments should never be one blob; if some day the centre turns out to be someone, the mark will not need redrawing.
The capsule
One anchor, top-left, on every surface — the door, the app, every public page. Sign in and the fixed point never moves. Its material is liquid glass, tested over Sathi's real ground rather than a mockup's.
the material studyWarmth, equanimity, exactness
Warm paper ground, night that is a place rather than an inversion. Nothing shouts: unread is weight, never a badge; the alarm ring breathes; every animation ends by coming home to the idle mark. And every choice is measured — radii audited, spirals derived, decisions dated — so taste can be checked, not just asserted.
the motion grammarOne inhabited story
The homepage story lab
An inhabited day, a quiet constellation, and a paper theatre. Three moving directions, with the selected study rendered from the same component as the real door.
The mark, alive
The motion lab
Twenty-five states of one logo — it looks, reads, flies, and always comes home. The centre disc and its spirals animate independently, so a state is geometry, not a tween. Every frame is a real golden spiral.
The apps
Each one clones its native counterpart, honestly — designed states first, wiring second.
Chat
the conversation surface — and the mark doing its jobs
Voice
one waveform for every voice surface
Documents
papers with honest states
Notes
iPhone Notes' grammar, ticked items sink
Music
the family's own server, native grammar
Clock
wheels, weekday chips, a ring that breathes
the calm Gmail twin — unread is weight, never a badge
Games
seventeen add-ons that need no signal
The archive — arguments we kept
Dozens of candidates lost here — comma lobes, curvature ladders, a 1% asymmetry measured to death. The reasons they lost are why they stay.
The archive — arguments we kept
Dozens of candidates lost here — comma lobes, curvature ladders, a 1% asymmetry measured to death. The reasons they lost are why they stay.
The full argument lives in the repo — docs/design/ and brand/MOTION_v1.md.