Originally developed at sub during an internal research phase for Ye’s broader utopian vision. The brief was to turn the circle, a recurring motif across his work, into a working visual language. It needed to separate food, shelter, clothing, music and technology, and to take on new sectors without changes to the visual language. The project was shelved before release, along with the wider effort, amid the controversy surrounding Ye.

The circle was the only fixed input. We started by deconstructing it into modular fragments: arcs, segments, partial rings. We then sorted these by size into four groups, from a compact core mark to a full outer ring. Layering one group over another and shuffling the combinations generated near-endless options. From these, we selected the forms that read most clearly as icons for each sector. Each was then refined by hand, tightened and rebalanced.