The ring, nine ways

Would not ship — but this is the fix, isolated. Same square, same plate, same 66% inset as round two; only the ink changed, from a colour rung 4 never wears to the one it does. It is a real correction and it is not a design. What would kill it: it is still a small symbol centred with an even inset on a dark rounded square in one bright accent, which is the exact template the owner called out. Keep it as the control the rest of the page is measured against.

Would ship, second tier. The plate stops being generic dark-app navy and becomes the rung's own hue driven down to a ground — the tile now has a colour identity instead of borrowing one. Cord against ground is 5.1:1, so the weave holds — a tenth less separation than the navy plate gives the same cord. What would kill it: the mark is still centred with a safe inset, so this fixes the palette without touching the structure the owner objected to, and at 16px the low-contrast violet-on-violet is the weakest small render on this page.

Would ship. The ring is drawn at 108% of the square, so the braid runs off all four edges and only the corners stay open. Nothing is centred-with-an-inset any more: the tile is a window onto a rope that is plainly bigger than it. The weave is now 39px of cord at 512 rather than 24, which is why it survives the shrink. What would kill it: it is unarguably a crop, and a crop is a decision someone has to be willing to defend — at 16px it stops being a ring and becomes a violet texture.

A harder crop was tested and dropped. At 145% the braid stops closing into a ring and becomes four unrelated bars, which is an accident rather than a decision — the two tiles here are 108% and 145% at 96 px, and the second is the one to argue with:

Would ship, second tier. Figure and ground swap: the cord becomes the whole field and the knot is the dark channel cut through it. It is the brightest tile here, so it is the one that survives a cluttered home screen best, and the crossings still read because the casing is painted in the field. What would kill it: its silhouette is identical to 01's, so the inversion is a colour move dressed as a structural one — and a full-bleed lavender square is a lot of one hue to ask a launcher to carry.

Would ship, and it is the honest one. This is the lobby card's own drawing at icon scale: cord #a77ce0, the filament round two deleted, and the same 1px/33% halo, on the app's own #12151e. Put it beside the card below and it is visibly the same object, which no other mark here can claim. What would kill it: structurally it is 01 — small symbol, even inset, dark square — and the filament and halo it is built on are invisible below about 48px, so everything that makes it special is gone exactly where icons are usually seen.

Would ship, and it answers a real objection. The ring is cut into six 60° wedges carrying the six cord values in ladder order, so one cord climbs rung 1 to rung 6 as it goes round. A single-rung colour says the icon means Turk's Head; this says it means Wordknots, six games a day. What would kill it: six hues on one small object is close to the rainbow-gradient reflex the owner is already suspicious of, and below 32px it is a coloured smudge with no ladder legible in it. Rung 6's blaze against the plate is 4.7:1, the weakest ink on any dark tile here.

Would not ship alone. The level's light ink #8c56d6 on the light panel, so the pair below shows what the launcher actually gets if the icon follows the app's theme. It is the calmest tile on the page, the only one that does not shout, and at 4.4:1 the lowest contrast anywhere on this page. What would kill it: an installed icon has no idea which theme the app is in, and a near-white tile disappears into a light wallpaper and into the light launcher row it sits in. Ship one icon, and it should be the dark one.

Would not ship. Same closed subpath, filled with an even-odd rule instead of stroked — no path edited, and it is by a distance the most legible mark here at 16px. But filling it throws away the only thing the drawing was for: with no stroke there are no crossings, so nothing goes over or under and the knot becomes seven lozenges in a circle. What would kill it: it reads as a flower, a gear or a loading spinner long before it reads as a knot. Included because the legibility argument is real and someone should say out loud why it loses anyway.

Ship this one. The crop from 03, on the rung's own ground from 02, with the filament from 05 back inside the cord. Three faults answered at once: the colour is rung 4's, the ground is built from that same hue instead of generic navy, and the structure is a cropped window rather than a centred sticker. The filament gives the rope a lit core at 180px and costs nothing when it vanishes at 32. What would kill it: violet cord on a violet ground is the lowest-contrast combination on this page at 5.1:1 against the navy plate's 5.7:1, and if the owner wants the icon to punch in a crowded launcher row, 03 on the navy plate is the same idea with more contrast and less identity.