Xiao Long Bao, certified.
小籠包 as structure, never ornament.

XLB and 小籠包 occupy the same square. Latin stacked on the left edge, Chinese on the right — character for letter, a one-to-one bilingual column. Neither reads as translation. The single notch in the top edge is the pleat, reduced past recognition into pure geometry.

The mark must survive from favicon to facade without redrawing. At 100 px the seal reads as a confident glyph. At 10 metres it reads as architecture.

Below 100 px the seal remains legible as a mark; below 60 px it functions as a glyph and the characters are read as texture. Both are acceptable. Redrawing a "simplified" version is not.

Four colours. Two do the work, one watches, one signs. Seal Red appears at most once per surface — it is a signature, not a palette entry.

Approximate coverage on any composition: Carbon + Unbleached ≥ 92%. Seal Red ≤ 5%. Graphite fills the remainder. No tints, no opacity steps, no gradients — a colour is at full strength or absent.

One monospaced brutalist sans carries everything Latin — menu, waybill, signage, captions. The waybill is set like a specimen sheet; the menu is set like the waybill. No second typeface is permitted for display.

Production note: interim cut is IBM Plex Mono + Noto Serif SC. Phase two commissions a bespoke mono with the seal's chamfer logic drawn into X, L, B, plus a licensed Song cut for the three characters. Four glyphs need custom drawing: X, L, B, and the numeral 8 (menu prices).

Three states. The red state exists only as a physical impression — rubber stamp, letterpress, brand iron. No two impressions are identical; imperfection is the luxury signal.

Banned states: partial opacity, rotation, outlines, drop shadows, digital reproduction of the red seal where physical application is possible, and more than one seal per surface.

The seal is applied, never merely printed. Stamped, debossed, branded, scored. Every vendor contract specifies the application method, not just the artwork.

Six monochrome specimens, two material macros, one seal post — a fixed meter, run indefinitely. The seal post migrates through each cycle of nine, stepping diagonally across the profile like a chop moving across a scroll.

Captions: lowercase, one sentence, bilingual on seal posts only, no hashtags in the body, no emoji ever. Reels: static camera, one take, no cuts, no music — room audio on. Profile picture: carbon seal. The red is earned in the grid, not spent on the avatar.

1. The seal never appears twice at the same size in the same field of view. One seal per surface.
2. Physical application over digital print, always: stamp, deboss, brand, score.
3. No steam wisps — not even "tasteful" ones, not even in motion. No dragons, no lanterns, no heritage tropes.
4. No gradients, no tints, no partial opacity, no rotation of the seal, no drop shadows in graphics. Shadows come from daylight or they don't come.
5. Photography: natural light only, one source, hard or diffused — never artificial fill, never flat.
6. Seal Red at most once per surface, at most once per nine posts.
7. 小籠包 is structure: cap-height matched, row-locked, never scaled to fit, never ornamental.
8. No currency symbols on menus. No emoji anywhere. No vinyl anywhere.
9. Hours, batch numbers, and corrections are made by hand — stamped or in pencil — and replaced, not patched.
10. When in doubt, remove one thing.