# Shape Grammar System

A visual system for my writing. I drew the grammar; AI turned it into a system that maps every post.

## The problem

My writing had no images. Twelve posts, twelve title cards in a pastel box.

Stock illustration felt wrong for posts about judgment and process. Generated images would have looked like everyone else's. What I wanted was a system, not pictures: something with rules, where a post's image says something about its argument, and where post thirteen fits without anyone redrawing the first twelve.

## Three shapes. Five ways to relate.

I started with the grammar and one reference graph. Every glyph is built from a circle, a triangle and a square, joined by one of five relations. Relations compose, so any glyph can become part of a larger one. That's what makes it a system and not a set of icons.

### Primitives

```glyph-primitives
```

### Relations

```glyph-relations
```

Fill carries the shape, ink carries the relation. Lines, nodes and nested marks are always ink; bodies are always fill. That one rule keeps every glyph readable, as a small cover or a full hero.

## Nine pairs, five relations, 45 glyphs.

Each row is an ordered pair A · B. Order matters: a triangle on a square is not a square on a triangle.

Seeing every combination at once is how you test a system. If one cell reads wrong, the rule behind it is wrong, and it's wrong everywhere.

```glyph-matrix
```

## Relations chain into larger glyphs.

A finished glyph behaves like a single shape, so it can be connected, stacked, nested or anchored again. Brackets group a sub-glyph.

These compounds are the reference patterns. Every post glyph is composed the same way.

```glyph-compounds
```

## Where AI did the work

The grammar and the reference were mine. Everything after that I built with AI, and that's where the scale came from.

**Mapping meaning to form.** Turning a post into a glyph is a translation problem: read the argument, find its core claim, name the parts, decide how they relate. AI reads every post with the same rules applied every time and proposes a formula for each, with a one-line reading of why it fits.

```glyph-example
learning-loop
```

**Building out the system.** From the reference, AI generated the matrix and the compounds above: every pair against every relation, then the chains that combine them. That's the exhaustive part a system needs and a person rarely finishes.

**Scaling it.** The glyphs live in code, not image files. Colour comes from the same tokens as the rest of the site: each post takes the pastel of its topic. A check runs on every build. Every post has a glyph, no glyph breaks the grammar, no two posts share a formula. When I publish a new post, the writing skill proposes two formulas as part of the process. I pick one.

## What stays mine

AI proposes; I decide.

What the shapes mean, that a triangle is change and that nesting means "part of", is a design decision, and it's the thing that makes the glyphs mean anything. So is saying no to a mapping that's technically correct but reads wrong. A formula can follow every rule and still miss the point of the post.

## Every post so far

```glyph-grid
```

## The rules

- Three primitives, five relations. Nothing else.
- Five shapes at most.
- No text inside a glyph.
- One formula per post, never repeated.
- Colour comes from the post's topic, never picked per glyph.