The deployment contract · System specification
One system. Three contexts.
How a mark deploys on a yoghurt pot is not how it deploys on a bin lid. Same icon, different contract.
This page documents the placement, sizing, and typographic rules for deploying Love You Bye marks across the three contexts they appear in: product packaging, kerbside bin lids, and public signage. It is the contract between the design system and the people who apply it — brand designers, signage contractors, and council communications teams.
The visual system is literal, not moral. It tells a person where something goes. It does not tell them whether they are a good or bad citizen. Consistency across contexts is the product; consistency is what makes the system legible at a glance, in any town, on any surface.
01 · The matrix
Three contexts, three levels, nine deployments.
Rows are the context the mark appears in. Columns are the preparation level the mark calls for. Each cell is a canonical deployment — this is how the combination should look, at production scale, in Aotearoa.
Glass bottle
Pouaka karāhe
→ Glass recycling
Yoghurt pot
Pouaka kākama
Soft plastic
Kirihou ngohengohe
→ Landfill
May be recyclable at soft-plastic drop-off.
Organics bin
Ipu para māori
→ Food scraps and garden waste only
Mixed recycling
Ipu hangarua
→ No lids · Rinse all containers · Flatten cardboard
Landfill bin
Ipu para
→ Everything else
Transfer station
Whakawhiti tūnga
→ Accepted materials, no preparation required
Hazardous drop-off
Tukunga morearea
→ Bring in original container · Seal lids · Never mix chemicals
Street bin
Ipu tiriti
→ Landfill
Use recycling stations for bottles, cans, paper.
02 · The prep library
Starter pictos for conditional deployments.
Level 2 deployments require a preparation step before the material enters its correct pathway. The prep library is a small set of pictos that attaches to the mark to describe what needs to happen. This library will grow to six or eight pictos covering the most common kerbside prep actions. Three are in production now.
Rinse
Horoi
Before any food-contact container enters mixed recycling. A thin film of residue is fine; visible sauce is not.
Remove lid
Tangohia te taupoki
When the lid is a different material or size from the body. Small lids jam MRF sorters and are filtered to landfill.
Flatten
Papatahi
For cardboard and paper cartons. Flattening preserves kerbside volume and keeps optical sorters accurate.
03 · Typography & sizing
The sizing contract.
Three reproduction contexts, three minimum sizes. The mark must be reproduced at or above the minimum for the surface it appears on, paired with the label in Manrope at the weight and size specified below. No exceptions for shelf-talkers or promotional collateral.
| Context | Min mark size | Label type | Label size |
|---|---|---|---|
| Packaging (front-of-pack) | 10 mm | Manrope 500 uppercase | 8 pt |
| Bin lid | 40 mm | Manrope 600 uppercase | 18 pt |
| Kerbside signage | 100 mm | Manrope 600 uppercase | 36 pt |
Clear space
Every mark holds a minimum of 25 per cent of its own height as breathing room on all sides. No type, no illustration, no border crosses that zone. On bin lids the zone widens to 40 per cent to absorb weathering and oblique viewing angles.
Colour reproduction
Marks are CMYK-safe across the category colours. Pantone spot equivalents are available in the print pack for jobs that spec a spot hit. Avoid screen-only RGB values on physical substrates — they will drift on uncoated stock.
File formats
SVG for any digital surface. CMYK EPS for offset print. PDF for tradepub and signage fabrication. Raster PNG is provided for completeness but discouraged — it does not scale and will pixelate on large-format kerbside signs.
Licence
The marks are licensed under CC BY 4.0. You may use them in commercial and council work without a paid licence. Attribution is required in the colophon or imprint of the finished piece.
04 · Bilingual pairing
Two languages, one icon.
Aotearoa is a bilingual country. The deployment contract treats English and te reo Māori as equal carriers of meaning attached to the same visual mark. The icon is never translated — it is shared. The words underneath are paired, not ranked.
- English occupies the primary (upper) block, te reo Māori the secondary (lower) block — same size, same weight, rendered at slightly reduced contrast using
text-lyb-grey-600against the primarytext-lyb-black. - The visual weight is equal. Do not shrink the te reo block, do not set it in italic, do not set it in a lighter weight. The only differentiation is colour contrast, and it is intentional — signalling secondary without signalling lesser.
- Both language blocks attach to the same icon. Never translate the icon itself, never produce a separate Māori-language set. One mark, two labels.
- Where space is constrained — a 10 mm front-of-pack mark on a sachet, for example — set English only and place a small
MIfootnote mark pointing to the full bilingual label on the back-of-pack. Never drop te reo from the system; always make it reachable.
Glass packaging
Karāhe takai
Glass recycling · Hangarua karāhe
05 · Downloads
Take the contract into the wild.
The deployment pack bundles every mark in every production format, the prep pictos as a stand-alone set, the sizing and clear-space specifications, and a bilingual label template for packaging and signage.
This specification is versioned and updated as the system grows. Current version v1.0.0· Last reviewed April 2026.