Marketplace logos on a dark UI —
three treatments, decided visually

Third-party recipe logos arrive inconsistent: transparent PNGs, all-black marks that vanish on dark, no padding, baked-in shadows, wild bounding boxes. Below, the same ten hard cases rendered three ways on the real dark recipe-card surface — the do-nothing case, the white-plates proposal, and the standardized LogoTile. Scan any row across all three columns.

The same ten logos, three ways

each row is one hard case · verdicts per column

1 · Raw on dark

logos placed directly on the card
breaks

2 · White plates

each logo on its own white patch
safe but loud

3 · LogoTile

one standardized chip quarantines the mess
recommended

LogoTile — the component spec

option 3, defined precisely enough to build
tile 1em = size · radius 10px @48
dashed = 62% content box
logo contain + centered inside it
sizes32 (dense list rows) · 48 (marketplace cards — shown above) · 64 (recipe detail header — shipped in morpheus.html)
radius10px at 48 (the --radius-input tier; scale proportionally: 8 @32, 10 @64)
background--surface2 — one neutral for every logo, both themes (#33333D-range dark / warm gray light). Never hardcoded, never per-logo.
border1px --line hairline — separates the tile from the card without adding a second visual voice
content box62% of tile per axis (≈30px inside 48) — the inner-padding ratio every logo respects, so optical size is uniform regardless of each mark's own bounding box
fitobject-fit: contain, centered on both axes, aspect preserved. Wordmarks fill the content-box width and stay vertically centered. Rasters never upscale past intrinsic size.
  • R1Monochrome-dark marks auto-invert. If a mark is effectively single-color and dark (luminance below threshold), render it inverted on the dark tile — see Corvid and HexKit in column 3. Colored marks are left alone.
  • R2Baked-in backgrounds are tolerated, not fixed. A logo that ships its own colored plate (Forge) sits inside the tile — the inconsistency is quarantined to 30px instead of shouting from the card. Prefer a transparent variant when the vendor offers one.
  • R3Baked shadows and off-center bounding boxes are neutralized by geometry. The 62% content box + contain centering re-centers lopsided artwork; a baked shadow reads as part of the mark instead of a smudge on a white plate.
  • R4No exceptions. No per-logo tile colors, no size overrides, no white plates for "just this one." The moment one logo escapes the tile, the card is back to arbitrating every vendor's brand kit.
REWRITE