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Decision log
D-044August 4, 2026

The integration mark is drawn, not borrowed

Decided

every connector card and the mapping drawer carry the same first-party glyph in the slot a vendor logo would occupy — an inline SVG of a dashed ring around a solid diamond — and FIRST_PARTY_STATEMENT explains it once, above the grid, rather than fifteen times into a screen reader.

Affects: components/integrations/integration-grid.tsx, lib/integrations.ts

Alternative: a wall of vendor logos, which is what every competitor's integrations page does and what the visual gap on each card was asking for.

Why not, on two grounds that happen to agree. The legal one: these are other companies' trademarks, and a grid of them implies an endorsement none of them has given. Salesforce, NetSuite and Sage all have brand-usage policies that a scraped PNG on a marketing page does not satisfy.

The honest one is the more interesting. A logo makes a claim about a relationship. For most of this catalogue the relationship is "we read their published API documentation carefully and wrote an adapter against it" — which is a *better* thing to be able to say than a partnership badge, because it means there is no third party to escalate to when a sync breaks, and it is not what a logo says. Borrowing the artwork would have traded a true and differentiating claim for a vague and slightly false one.

So the glyph is ours and it is abstract on purpose: the dashed ring is the vendor's system, whose boundary we do not own and do not control; the solid diamond is the adapter, which we wrote and which we are the ones who fix. A mark that tried to look like a plug or a handshake would be making the same relationship claim in a different medium.

On visual hierarchy: the maturity pill sits beside the existing direction pill, and only "Implementation-led" gets colour. Two saturated badges would produce a card with no hierarchy. The one that earns colour is the level carrying a consequence for the reader's plan — a caveat styled as quietly as a boast does not get read.