The puzzle
Plutarch tells how the Athenians kept the ship of their hero Theseus for generations. As its planks rotted, they replaced them one at a time, until philosophers argued about whether any of the original ship was left, and whether that mattered. Centuries later, Thomas Hobbes added a twist: suppose someone collected all the old planks and rebuilt the original ship next to the repaired one. Which of the two is the real Ship of Theseus?
There's no tidy answer, and that's the point. The puzzle forces you to say what identity actually rests on: the material, the shape, the history, or the name.
Every brand is a ship at sea
Brands never stay still. A logo gets simplified for small screens. A typeface gets swapped for a better variable version. A website gets rebuilt every few years. Each change is a plank.
Most brand anxiety comes from not knowing which planks are structural. Change the wrong one and customers feel it immediately, even if they can't say why. Refuse to change anything and the ship rots at the dock.
Building a ship I knew I'd rebuild
When I designed the identity for this portfolio, I knew it would keep changing. It's my own site, I build new things for it constantly, and every project adds something. So the question from the start wasn't "what should it look like?" but "what must never change, so everything else can?"
The mark started as sketches: an A and a B, cut through by a ringed planet. It went through many iterations, a construction grid, light and dark lockups, a version small enough to read as a browser tab icon. If you compared the first sketch to what's live now, you'd find almost no shared lines. And yet it's clearly the same idea.
Here are the planks I decided were the keel:
- One hot accent. A single orange, used sparingly, against deep space colors. Every page, every card, every button follows that rule.
- Square corners, everywhere. No rounded buttons, no pill tags. It sounds small, but it's the thing people notice first when it breaks.
- A small set of named tokens. Void, deep, panel, starlight, signal. New sections pick from them instead of inventing colors.
- Three type roles. Display, body and mono, each with a job.
Everything else is replaceable planking. The planets change color per project. Sections get rebuilt, animations get swapped, new pages appear. The Observatory you're reading is one of the newest parts of the site, and it still looks like it's always been here, because it was built from the same keel. That fixed keel is also what lets the rest of the site be loud, which is the argument of Less is a bore.
Structure over material
My answer to Theseus, at least for brands, is that identity lives in the structure, not the material. A ship is the same ship if it keeps its shape, its purpose and its continuous story, even if every board is new. A brand is the same brand if it keeps its proportions, its rules and its voice, even if every asset is redrawn.
This is why a design system isn't a style guide PDF. It's the keel, written down in a form the build can enforce: color variables instead of hex codes, utility classes instead of one-off styles, components instead of copies. When the rules live in the system, replacing a plank can't accidentally change the shape of the ship.
And Hobbes' second ship?
Hobbes' twist is the one I think about during redesigns. If you keep every old asset exactly as it was but rebuild everything around it with new rules, you can end up with the old pieces on a ship that no longer feels like yours. Old logos on a new layout often feel like that: technically original, emotionally foreign.
So I'd rather keep the rules and replace the parts than keep the parts and replace the rules.
In practice
- Before a redesign, write down the three to five things that must not change.
- Put those into the system itself: variables, tokens, shared classes.
- Let everything else be replaceable, and replace it without guilt.
- Test a change by asking whether someone who knew the old brand would feel at home.
- Redraw the mark if you need to. Keep its proportions.
The ship will change. That's what ships are for. The job is making sure it's still the one people recognize coming into the harbor.