Both strands are the same curve, mirrored on the vertical axis, crossing exactly once at the optical centre. The single crossing is what keeps it legible at favicon size — a true double helix turns to mush below 24px.
Tested down to 16px. Two crossings read as a blur; one reads as a knot, which is the idea.
Constant at every size. The mark is never optically thinned for large display use.
The strand order is fixed. Reversed, it reads as a different company at a glance.
Never inside the mark. The mark is two flat strands; gradient belongs to backgrounds and data only.
Horizontal everywhere by default. Mark-only owns the app icon, the favicon and anything under 120px wide.
Every value is a semantic token resolved per theme. Try the theme switch in the header: nothing below was redrawn, the tokens simply resolved differently. That is the whole point of the system.
--surface and --accent. No component hard-codes a hex value anywhere in the product.A single family across marketing and product removes the seam customers usually feel when they sign up. Mono is reserved for values a machine produced or a person can paste into a terminal.
Console, CLI, app icons, docs and status page. Ninety per cent of the time a customer sees Helix, they are logged in — so the product is the brand's primary surface, not its afterthought.
Three behaviours: the mark resolving on load, work in progress, and a live connection. If an animation does not report a system state, it does not ship.