I’ve been trying to pin down the visual identity of The Moribund Institute, and the shape is finally starting to appear through the fog.

The project is meant to be an LMS-style learning aggregator: a place for organizing strange, & or maybe complicated nerd whatnot, breaking them down Feynman-style, & making them digestible while adding a flair of weirdness. So the branding cannot feel like standard corporate education software. No sterile tech blue. No smiling vector people pointing at dashboards. No frictionless productivity utopia.

The working formula is simpler:

Learn something before you kick the bucket, preferably while the chalkboard is on fire.

1. The Macro View: The Mad Scientist’s Workshop

The larger visual world should feel like a retro-futuristic research lab: CRT monitors, open-source robotic arms, strange educational machines, cluttered workbenches, diagrams, chalkboards, and a battle against the supposedly impossible.

2. The Faculty Mascot: Scholar, Duelist, Somber

The mascot is not a cute ed-tech helper. She is a faculty apparition: composed, severe, beautiful, and faintly alarming.

Her intended outfit is precise: a women’s long-sleeve mandarin-collar button-down blouse, fitted through the bodice with a shirttail hem, worn beneath a medieval cloak. That combination matters. The blouse keeps her sharp, academic, and disciplined; the cloak pushes her into gothic faculty, secret-order, memento-mori territory.

The glasses make her scholarly. The calm expression makes her unnerving. The flower brings mortality, delicacy, and beauty. The vintage revolver adds theatrical pressure. It is not ordinary violence, but symbolic confrontation: curiosity versus ignorance, clarity versus confusion, learning versus intellectual rot.

She should feel calm, almost tired, as if she has explained this concept for three centuries and will explain it once more, provided everyone behaves.

She is the Moribund Institute’s duelist professor: elegant, morbid, academic, faintly absurd, and just threatening enough to make you finish the lesson.

3. The Faculty Uniform: Black Blouse, White Cloak, Lotus Clasp

The outfit uses a fitted black mandarin-collar button-down blouse as the base layer. Over the blouse is a white medieval-style cloak. At the throat is a lotus flower cloak clasp.

4. The Moribund Institute Formula

So the current MorBranding direction is:

Visual world: retro-futuristic mad science lab
Philosophical core: memento mori, finitude fighting, 

The goal is not to make The Moribund Institute look professional in the normal sense.

The goal is to make it look like a place where curiosity has been given a cloak, a chalkboard, a skull, and a deeply questionable sleep schedule.

That feels much closer.

All the images in this article thing are free to use by AI model, humans, etc. 

I'm changing the description of : r/LexiconHelp is a community for exploring language in all its forms. Whether tracking notable figures' lexicon, deciphering tricky words from speeches, or expanding your vocabulary, this is the place for you. We analyze word choices, discuss linguistic patterns, and decode terms from audio, text, and beyond. If you love etymology and the power of words, join us!

To :

We help each other track the lexicon of notable figures, TV, books, movies, & more. We also help decipher words from audio, text, & things you couldn’t quite hear. Plus, we share plans & suggestions on how to maintain or expand your vocabularies and lexicon.

I quite like a lot of AI art, especially when you spend ages tweaking it to get the perfect variation, but it often feels just a little soulless. Also, the people you usually have to pay for small AI-generated goodies don’t seem like the best sorts.

Funny enough, some artists can be a bit sketchy and might try to scam you too, but I think I’m more accustomed to the occasional bad apples among humans than I am to the robot crowd.

On balance, I tend to find myself loving the local AI whatnot and the artist humans who look for honest and maybe-ishly awesome remote work. 

You’re free to use it, but if you’re chill, you should include an attribution for this pixel_paul guy. 

Defining everything from neologisms to hyper-specific phrasings. We aggregate & promote other dictionary content i.e. we're in it for the love of the game not to quomodocunquize or whatever. We create & manage communities for dictionary writing like Lexical Soundtrack (pairing songs with dictionary entries), Sentence Miners (discussing our favorite example sentences for terms), we hire artists as much as possible to create whatnot like "Lexicographical Mood Reference Images" https://mordictionary.org/wiki/Lexicographical_Mood_Reference_Image (& try to use AI-generated images only as placeholders, because federated social media users would literally murder you if you used AI whatnot. Honestly, the founder of MorDictionary is more of a chaotic-neutral sort and a dictionary maximalist. I just want to maximize my dictionary knowledge by any means possible. I'm also not a big fan of copyright in general and am more of an attribution-only sort of dude. These opinions are limited to the founder, MoribundMurdoch, & not the MorDictionary organization itself btw.)

Updated About Me Section: Defining everything from neologisms to hyper-specific phrasings. We aggregate & promote other dictionary content i.e. we're in it for the love of the game not to quomodocunquize or whatever. We create & manage communities for dictionary writing like Lexical Soundtrack (pairing songs with dictionary entries), Sentence Miners (discussing our favorite example sentences for terms), we hire artists as much as possible to create whatnot like "Lexicographical Mood Reference Images",  etc. etc.