principle. interface elements must stay clean at every size they will ever render (tray icon, retina, fractional scaling, all of it). an asset that only works at one resolution breaks later, at a size nobody tested.

rule (law; decision 0002).

• everything authored in Distira is vector first and resolution independent: icons, the tray mark, glyphs, shapes, the wordmark, any future illustration. sources are vector — never pixels.
• raster exists only at the end of the pipeline: a fresh render from the vector source at the exact target density (1x, 1.25x, 1.5x, 2x, fractional scaling), never an existing raster scaled up.
• photos and screenshots are the only inherently raster material, and they are never interface assets.
• one vector source per icon, recoloured per state by the current colour — hover, selected, disabled from colour and opacity, never separate assets. outline is the default variant; fill marks the active state. icon stroke tracks the adjacent text weight (1.5px at regular, 2px at medium and semibold, 2.5px at bold).
• icons are designed at render size and tested at the smallest render, often 16px; simplified glyphs for small contexts.

rule (proposed). per-size hand-tuning beats scaling at small sizes: the 16px tray mark is drawn at 16px, not shrunk from a large master. the construction grid: a 24-unit artboard, a 20-unit live area, keyline shapes for optical weight, one fixed stroke that is never thinned to fit a busy glyph — the glyph simplifies instead.

open. hairlines at fractional scale: 1px borders and the 1.5px selection outline need a stated rounding rule at 125% and 150% scaling so they never shimmer or vanish. the recorded proposal: snap to device pixels, minimum one device pixel, tested in the screenshot harness at 100/125/150/200%. no ruling yet.

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Canonical text: §9, vector and resolution law, in the design language document. Governed by decision 0002.