Cytoglyph · Art Quality Gate

Does the art clear the BioRender bar?

You said the mockup figures didn't look great yet, and the art has to be at least BioRender quality. This is the first real pass: a house style, a shading engine that restyles our 8,450 open-licence icons, and hand-drawn hero icons for the CAR-T set. Judge it and tell me which direction to scale.

8 October 2026 · all art from open-licence sources or drawn by us · nothing traced from BioRender

12
benchmark subjects
8,450
open-licence icons the engine can restyle
3
pipelines compared
8.2
median self-score, updated heroes

Updated this pass - the two you flagged, fixed

You said warm up the mitochondrion and add chromatin to the nucleus. Done, plus richer hand-drawn versions of the T cell, CAR-T cell and blast. These are the current quality bar — judge the rest of the page against these.

CAR-T cell

CAR-T cell

Volumetric teal body, off-centre nucleus, surface CARs with the amber scFv knob. The flagship cell.

8.5/10
B-ALL blast

B-ALL blast

High nucleus-to-cytoplasm ratio, mulberry chromatin, pale cytoplasmic rim. Reads as a lymphoblast at a glance.

8.5/10
Mitochondrionwarmed up, as you asked

Mitochondrion

Warm red-orange matrix, 3-D cristae, double membrane. This is the recolour you flagged on the grey source.

8.0/10
Nucleuschromatin added, as you asked

Nucleus

Chromatin threads + heterochromatin granules + nucleolus inside the envelope, not a bare sphere.

8.0/10
T cell

T cell

The clean resting T cell, redrawn with a stronger body gradient and microvilli.

8.0/10

Three ways to make the art

Every icon carries its licence and auto-generates a credit line on export. We never copy or trace BioRender.

1 · Restyle engine
Take a flat open-licence SVG and add house shading automatically: per-region 3-D gradients lit from top-left, hue-matched outlines, soft shadow. Deterministic, so it scales to the whole library.
2 · Hand-authored
We draw the icon from scratch to the house spec, then run it through the same engine. Used where no good source exists (VHH, CAR construct) and for hero cells.
3 · AI raster (reference)
Generate a picture with image AI. Looks nice for one-offs, but it's a flat photo: not recolourable, not editable, not consistent across a library. Shown for honest comparison only.

Pipeline 1 — the restyle engine on the real library

Left is the untouched open-licence source, right is the same file after the Cytoglyph engine. This is what 8,450 icons would look like.

T cell original
flat source
→
T cell restyled
Cytoglyph restyle

T cell

NIAID 509 · Public Domain

Source has no nucleus by design; restyle gives a clean 3-D cell. See the authored hero below for the richer version.

6.5/10
B-ALL blast original
flat source
→
B-ALL blast restyled
Cytoglyph restyle

B-ALL blast

Servier via Bioicons · CC-BY-3.0

High nucleus-to-cytoplasm ratio, correct for a lymphoblast. Source was already glossy; restyle deepens volume + adds contact shadow.

7.5/10
Macrophage original
flat source
→
Macrophage restyled
Cytoglyph restyle

Macrophage

NIAID 307 · Public Domain

Flat source → volumetric body, 3-D nucleus and vesicles, hue-matched violet contour instead of clip-art black.

7.5/10
IgG antibody original
flat source
→
IgG antibody restyled
Cytoglyph restyle

IgG antibody

Reactome R-ICO-012425 · CC-BY-4.0

Upright symmetric Y, chain-coloured. Restyle adds gradient depth to each arm.

7.0/10
Lentiviral particle original
flat source
→
Lentiviral particle restyled
Cytoglyph restyle

Lentiviral particle

NIAID 447 · Public Domain

Biggest win: envelope spikes, capsid and RNA all gain real volume. (Generic retroviral capsid; conical HIV capsid is a later variant.)

8.0/10
Mitochondrion original
flat source
→
Mitochondrion restyled
Cytoglyph restyle

Mitochondrion

Bioicons (jaiganesh) · CC0

Cristae read in 3-D. Source colour is a dull grey-mauve; a one-click recolour to warm-red is a library option.

6.5/10
Nucleus original
flat source
→
Nucleus restyled
Cytoglyph restyle

Nucleus

Reactome R-ICO-013121 · CC-BY-4.0

Clean sphere + nucleolus. Lacks chromatin; a chromatin/heterochromatin overlay is a planned enhancement.

6.0/10
Lab mouse original
flat source
→
Lab mouse restyled
Cytoglyph restyle

Lab mouse

NIAID 283 · Public Domain

Already a strong illustration; restyle adds a grounding contact shadow and gentle depth without harming it.

7.5/10
Flow cytometer original
flat source
→
Flow cytometer restyled
Cytoglyph restyle

Flow cytometer

Bioicons (Derek Croote) · CC0

Instrument panels gain depth, status light pops. Clean benchtop analyser.

7.0/10

Pipeline 2 — hand-authored hero icons

Drawn by us where the library had nothing (VHH, CAR construct) or needed a stronger version. Biology is enforced: CAR domain order is scFv → hinge → transmembrane → costimulatory → CD3ζ.

T cell (hero)

T cell (hero)

Hand-drawn to the house spec: teal body, large off-centre indigo nucleus, surface microvilli. Fully recolourable.

7.0/10
CAR-T cell

CAR-T cell

T cell + surface CARs (amber scFv knob on a grey stalk). The construct colour-code is consistent with the schematic.

7.0/10
VHH / nanobody

VHH / nanobody

No library source existed. Single Ig domain with CDR loops at the paratope — deliberately contrasts with the full IgG.

6.5/10
CAR construct

CAR construct

No library source existed. Biology-correct order: scFv → hinge → transmembrane → 4-1BB → CD3ζ (ITAM ticks). The money icon for the lab.

7.5/10

Pipeline 3 — AI raster, for honest comparison

These look good, but each is a 1.5 MB flat image. You can't recolour a region, swap 4-1BB for CD28, or keep 3,000 of them visually consistent. The product is an editable scene graph your Claude drives over MCP, so the library has to be vector. This is why we restyle and draw rather than generate.

T cell AI raster

T cell

GPT image (Paul's ChatGPT via Codex)

CAR-T cell AI raster

CAR-T cell

GPT image (Paul's ChatGPT via Codex)

CAR-T kills blast AI raster

CAR-T kills blast

GPT image (Paul's ChatGPT via Codex)

Composed: CAR-T killing a CD19+ B-ALL blast

The same figure two ways. Left is built from our own vector icons (every part movable and recolourable). Right is a single AI raster (take it or leave it).

composed scene, vector
Composed from our own vector art (CAR-T + blast)
composed scene, raster
Same scene as a single GPT raster (not editable)

What I need from you

Pick a direction and I'll start mass-producing (Phase C). My read: pipeline 1 (restyle engine) as the library default, with pipeline 2 (hand-authored) for the CAR-T / immunology hero set. Image AI stays off the critical path.

  1. Is this quality good enough to scale? If yes, I run the engine over all 8,450 icons and start the hero-draw list.
  2. Any icon here that's below bar? Tell me which and I'll fix the recipe before scaling (eg warm-up the mitochondrion, add chromatin to the nucleus).
  3. House palette ok? T cells teal, B/blast mulberry, macrophage amber, CAR domains amber/grey/slate/blue-or-teal/mulberry.

Reply in docs/build/PAUL-FEEDBACK.md or just tell me. Until you pick, I keep building the editor and the MCP connector.