Bearing Identity System.

Bearing Identity System is version 1.15 of the Third Bearing brand guidelines. Every chapter has two sides: experience, which you can turn, touch and play, and spec, which you are reading now.

The experience is for people meeting the brand. The spec is for people producing it: sizes, colour codes, files and rules. The two sides always say the same thing.

v1.15 keeps every rule of v1.1. What changed: the brand pattern. The Truchet field of quarter arcs, which every generated pattern now looks like, is replaced by Section: the bearing drawn as a cut, the way a drawing office draws one, from the mark's own numbers. Meet, the game in chapter 09, is played on it.

Controls

What changed in v0.4

The v0.3 manifesto had nine paragraphs. v0.4 keeps its ideas (art and design, friction, concept first, notes, direction over style, not knowing) in one thesis and four lines. Short sentences, no metaphors to decode.

How to set it

The thesis may be set large. Its second line is the one Apsis line of the view; the rest is Nitride. The four lines are set as a numbered list, never as a paragraph. Lines may be quoted on their own, credited as /item: manifesto, line n. Never reworded.

Where it lives

The website root, the back of the tee, the first page of every codex. zine, and the red chapter of this document. Red Hot Bearing may be the whole background here and nowhere else with text.

One name, written two ways. In a sentence it is Third Bearing. As a logo it is thirdbearing. The two never swap places.

The parent brand is Third Bearing. The legal entity is PT Poros Orbit Ketiga; it appears on contracts, invoices, letterheads and the copyright line of legal documents, never as a logo.

The parent holds three sub-brands: studio., objekt. and codex. “Studio” is a sub-brand, not part of the parent name.

How the lockups are built

Wordmark on top. Descriptor below in Apsis Bold with the turned e (studio. objəkt. codəx.), kerned, tracking −8 units, in the accent colour, ending in a full stop. The descriptor's x-height is fixed and its full stop lines up with the right edge of the g. From v0.8 the descriptors are drawn from the studio's own Apsis; the files shown here are in brand-identity/v1.15/lockups/, and the masters in assets/brand/svg/lockup/ follow once the owner signs off.

When to use which

Use a lockup when the piece belongs to one sub-brand only. Use the plain wordmark for anything that speaks for all of Third Bearing: the website root, contracts, the manifesto. Never put two lockups side by side; list the sub-brands in type instead.

Symbolism

(1) and (2). Two construction circles sit on opposite corners of the grid. Read them as art and design. Each cuts into the shape from its own side. Neither reaches the centre.

housing (a), housing (b). What the circles leave behind are the two housings: identical, turned 180° against each other. Nothing in the mark leans to one side.

(third). The dot in the middle is the bearing: the studio. It is held by both housings and touched by neither. The ring of empty space around it is the friction the manifesto talks about.

Logotype

thirdbearing: one word, all lowercase, a heavy grotesque with tight spacing. Artwork, never typed. The two i-dots and the superscript mark carry the accent colour: Red Hot Bearing on light and dark, White Lithium Grease on red.

Vertical versions read bottom to top, for spines, sleeves and banners. mono-dark / mono-light are for one-ink jobs, embossing and laser.

Rules

• Ratio 60 White Lithium Grease / 25 Dead Metal Spark / 10 Red Hot Bearing / 5 Purple Flame + Titanium Grey.
• Red text on dark only from 24 px. Small red text on dark: Red 300 (7.19:1).
• Titanium Grey is never text on light. Lines, guides and disabled states only.
• Purple Flame on light is the safest accent text (7.17:1). Never on red or dark.
• On red, text is White Lithium Grease, Book weight or heavier.
• codex. is exempt: any colour, any ramp, inside codex. work only. The logo keeps its own colours unless the piece is labelled as an experiment.

Nitride

Text face: body, headings, labels, tables, UI. A grotesque with the fullness of a machined radius, formal and quiet next to industrial product. Its points are square pixels, as in Apsis, bitten from Bold up. Tracking 0 at every text size. Tabular figures (tnum) for numbers in tables. From 10 px. Its full system, and the variable file, are chapter 06.

Every weight has an italic, slanted 8°.

Apsis

Display face: titles, subtitles, covers, posters, and the sub-brands beside the mark. A contrast serif drawn with a flat pen: thick verticals, hairline horizontals, one hairline throughout. Open strokes end in bearing balls, curves step on a pixel grid, the dots of i and j are bitten pixels, and the t and f bars stand off their stems by a constructed gap. Nitride does the work; Apsis interrupts it. One Apsis line per view.

Below 24 px use Nitride. Never Apsis for body text, buttons or anything longer than two lines.

objekt.objekt.

Apsis has one twist: an e turned half a turn, ə, like the mark's two housings. The plain e is the default, so titles and running words read as they are written. The turned e is feature ss01 (font-feature-settings: "ss01") and its own character, U+0259.

Use it for the sub-brands (studio. objəkt. codəx., as the lockups draw them) and for one word on a cover or poster. Never for a whole headline and never in Nitride, which has none. ss02 gives Apsis its cipher letters (a, e, t, r, g) for codex. and special occasions, ss03 the cipher e alone, and ss04 closes the gap in t and x. In Nitride, ss01 gives the single-storey a.

The unit is v, a tenth of the x-height: 53 of the font's 1000 units. The x-height (530) is the wordmark's and Apsis's, so a line of Nitride sits on a line of Apsis without adjustment. Ascender and descender both reach 4 v past the x-height band, which keeps lines close without the rows touching.

Open strokes end on the two terminal lines. The c, e and s stop on L and U, which cut the x-height 2.5 : 5 : 2.5; the figures 2, 3 and 5 stop on the same quarter lines of the cap height. That is why a line of Nitride looks level: its ends line up, letter to letter. The e's bar sits where its eye and its opening are the same height.

Round letters overshoot by v / 5 (capitals v / 4). Points (the dots of i and j, the full stop, the colon) are the stem's own square, its corner bitten from Bold up, the same mark as Apsis's bitten pixel.

Line spacing in the font is 980 above and 280 below (1.26 em), so line-height: normal never clips. Set the leading yourself, from the scale below.

Each stem is 1.2 times the one before (Light sits two steps below Book). Horizontals are a little thinner than stems, and thin a little more as the weight grows, and the counters close slightly, so Black still reads at a distance.

Nitride Variable holds the whole range in one file per slope (wght 300–900). Its six named instances are the static fonts, outline for outline, with the same spacing and kerning; between them it interpolates. Use a named weight by default. Use an in-between value only for one of these corrections, and write it down:

• On dark: light text on Graphite looks heavier. Take 20 off (Book → 380, Medium → 480).
• Very small: at 10–12 px on screen, add 20 (Book → 420), so the stems hold.
• Motion: the weight may animate on the bearing curve (chapter 07), never faster than 480 ms, and always settles on a named weight.

The few letters whose drawing changes between two weights (the &'s small counter, the ß's bowls) switch half-way between the two masters, so no in-between weight ever shows a broken letter.

Two weights per layout. Book and Medium carry nearly everything. Light only for ledes, Black only for numerals, and never all six on one page.

Flush left, ragged right. Never justified, never centred for more than two lines. Break by sense, not by width.

Figures. Proportional in running text, tabular (tnum) in tables and prices, frac for fractions, zero where a 0 could read as an O (codes, serial numbers). Indonesian prices: Rp and full stops for thousands.

Italic is the roman slanted 8°. For titles of works and one emphasis in a paragraph; never a whole paragraph, never with underline.

Never faked. No synthetic bold or italic, no outline, no stretch. If a weight is missing, the font is not loaded: fix the file.

With Apsis. Apsis from 24 px for one line per view; Nitride for everything under it. Set a Nitride label above an Apsis title, never an Apsis label above Nitride. Same x-height, so a mixed line needs no baseline shift.

Colour. Graphite on White Lithium Grease, or the reverse. Muted text in Titanium Grey on dark only. One red word at most, and never a red paragraph.

Smallest. 10 px on screen, 6.5 pt in print. Below that, cut words, not size.

Tracking follows the weight. 0 up to Medium; at display sizes −0.01 em at Bold and −0.02 em at Black, and in proportion between them (Demibold −0.005 em, 800 −0.015 em). It fades in from 40 px and is full from 64 px, so a line never jumps when its weight or size changes.

@font-face {
  font-family: "Nitride Variable";
  src: url("NitrideVariable.woff2") format("woff2");
  font-weight: 300 900;
}
body  { font: 400 16px/24px "Nitride Variable", "Nitride", system-ui, sans-serif; }
.dark { font-weight: 380; }          /* light on dark */
td.num { font-variant-numeric: tabular-nums; }
.label { font-weight: 500; font-size: 12px; line-height: 16px; }
.label--caps { text-transform: uppercase; letter-spacing: .06em; font-feature-settings: "case"; }

One module: 5 mm in print, about 20 px on screen. Every margin, gutter, column and image edge is a whole number of modules.

How the screen grid is calculated

A screen is rarely a whole number of 20 px modules wide. Instead of leaving a remainder, the module is tuned: module = screen width ÷ (2·margin + columns·k + gutters), with k (modules per column) chosen so the module stays closest to 20 px (18–22 px). At 1440 px that gives k = 5 and a module of 18.70 px; at 1280 px, k = 4 and 19.69 px. Margins, gutters and columns are then exact, and every column edge falls on a module line.

Vertically: the bar is 3 modules, content starts at module 5 and is a whole number of modules tall. Display type uses a half-module leading, so title lines fall on half-modules.

Composition of a chapter

Every chapter is laid out on the same four zones, so the eye moves in a Z from the title to the dial and nothing piles up in one corner:

References: the control strips of Braun audio (Dieter Rams, 1960s) and Teenage Engineering instruments: controls in one row under the thing they change, labelled in small type. Josef Müller-Brockmann's grid systems for the calculation of the module.

Motion principles

Rotation. Things turn about their own centre. Nothing flies in from off-screen.
Inertia. Large things start slowly. Small UI things start immediately.
Friction. Everything stops by slowing down. No bounce, no overshoot, no elastic.

Scrolling: one gesture turns one chapter, however hard the wheel or trackpad is flicked. Every motion has a still version for prefers-reduced-motion and for print.

Principles

1. Short. One idea per sentence. Most sentences under twelve words.
2. Plain. Everyday words. Say "use", not "leverage"; "made", not "crafted".
3. Specific. Numbers, materials, times. "Shore 20A, seven casts" instead of "premium quality".
4. Calm. No superlatives, no exclamation marks, no emoji.
5. We. The studio speaks as a group. Honest when we don't know yet.

Reference points: the product copy of Braun (things described by what they do), Apple (one short claim, then the fact that proves it), Teenage Engineering (lowercase, specific, a little dry). We take the plainness, not their sentences.

studio.

Clear and calm. Starts from the brief, ends with what was made.

“The brief asked for a sign. We made three signs and a rule for the fourth.”

objekt.

Precise and tactile. Numbers and materials first, adjectives last.

“Resin, ABS-like, 0.05 mm layers. Twelve parts, checked with a caliper. Two-part mould, shore 20A.”

codex.

Curious, note-like, free. Fragments and questions allowed. Dates and seeds always given.

“Experiment 03, seed 1907. The sort ran for four seconds. The mark melted to the left.”

Language

English for the brand itself: manifesto, descriptors, this document, the website root. Bahasa Indonesia where the audience is local: events, workshops, community posts, local clients, invoices. One language per piece.

Capitals

Sentence case for headings and buttons. “Third Bearing” always capitalised. Sub-brands always lowercase, even at the start of a sentence. No all-caps sentences.

Punctuation

The full stop in a sub-brand is part of the name. Do not double it. Em dashes sparingly. Spec labels keep slash and colon. No exclamation marks.

Experimental in front, industrial underneath: 70 / 30.

Experimental (70%) is what people meet: motion, particles, glitches, type that changes skin, sound, objects that are not sure what they are. It moves, it is driven by something real, and it is labelled when it is an experiment.

Industrial (30%) is what holds it: the grid, the construction arcs, spec labels, measured numbers, the five colours outside codex. It is quiet and never decorative.

Keep one thing fixed

Every experiment fixes one thing and lets the rest move: the mark, the grid or the palette. If nothing is fixed it is no longer Third Bearing; if everything is fixed it is no longer an experiment.

The poster slider

The poster is drawn on the Nitride poster system: a 400 × 500 mm sheet, a 20 mm margin and 18 × 23 cells of 20 mm, rotated lines in cell columns, a column of text, narrow lists on the right edge. The same sheet holds at every setting; only the share of experiment changes. Export PNG saves it at 3200 × 4000 px, Export SVG as a vector file set in Nitride and Apsis (install the fonts from brand/typeface/ to keep the text as text).

Five visual parts

1. The mark, cropped large at a page edge, or as a field of particles.
2. Hairline guides on the module grid.
3. Construction arcs: circles (1) and (2), as lines or as the Section pattern.
4. Spec labels: /subjkt: /item: in Nitride Light.
5. One object: a print, a cast, a render, a machine.

Use two or three at a time, never all five. Flat colour, straight cuts, no shadows, no gloss on the layout; depth comes from the object.

Photography and renders

Objects and process: printers mid-print, moulds opened, parts on a cutting mat, hands at work (cropped, never posed). One hard light or even studio light. Steel stays cool, paper stays warm, red only if it is really there. No stock people, lens flares, heavy filters, or AI images presented as real.

Pattern

Section: the bearing drawn as a cut, the way a drawing office draws one. One cell is the mark's square, 3u: the race (0.95u radius) with the ball inside (0.5u), left whole as a drawing office leaves a rolling element, with its centre lines; circles (1) and (2) as 1u bites on the corners, four of them closing a full circle where cells meet; everything else is housing, hatched. Every ball sits between two housings, as in the mark, and two housings that touch are hatched across each other, 45° and 135°, with the seam drawn. Between a bite and the race 0.17u is left, the mark's thinnest band.

Lines only, 1–2 px (0.25 mm in print), the hatch the thinner; never filled. Grey on light, White Lithium Grease on red or dark. Never inside the logo's clear space or behind body text. The tile repeats without a seam; the field leaves some bites out (seed 1907). Files: assets/brand/pattern/tb-pattern-section-*, from scripts/build-pattern-section.js. It replaces the Truchet field of v0.3–v1.1, whose quarter arcs every generated pattern now looks like.

Meet, the pattern game

On the experience side the Section pattern is a game. Each cell turns in quarters; its bites turn with it about the ball, which holds still, as the mark's housings do. Turn the cells until every bite meets three others: four bites at a corner close a full circle, which lights up in Red Hot Bearing with its centre lines and scores 40 (10 per cell), once. A bite at the edge of the board, or one its neighbours do not answer, stays grey. The hatch does not turn: it belongs to the housing, not the cell. Ten levels of one minute each, from a 4-cell-wide board to a 9-wide one with more bites and cells that hold all four; the seconds left come back as a bonus (× 5 × the level). The red button starts a level after 3-2-1; leaving the chapter pauses it. Scores stay in the browser that played them. The pattern rules above still hold: lines only, grey until lit.

Company data

Where each item goes

Email signature: brand-identity/v1.15/mockups/email-signature.html. Mockup source: brand-identity/v1.15/mockups/src/mockups.html, rendered by node scripts/build-mockups.js --v115.

Payment terms (default)

[Number]-[Type]-[Studio]-[LANG]_[Client]_[Project]__[YYYY-MM-DD]_v[n].pdf

Contact

Brand owner and approvals: Muhammad Aditya Wisesha, Founder.
PT Poros Orbit Ketiga · Perum Villa Tajur Blok D 2 No. 7, RT 004/RW 008, Kel. Sindangrasa, Kec. Bogor Timur, Kota Bogor, Jawa Barat 16145.
0877-6886-1215 · thirdbearing@gmail.com · instagram.com/thirdbearing

Colophon

Set in Nitride and Apsis, the studio's own typefaces (brand/typeface/). Built with HTML, WebGL2 and GSAP. Particles, toolpaths and glitches are computed live from geometry.json and tokens.json.