Step one of the configurator is the shortest instruction in the whole product: choose a mark. Twelve of them, numbered NO. 001 through NO. 012, and no way to add a thirteenth. We've written before about why the other lists are short — four inks, four grounds, four faces, sixteen pairings & not one more. Twelve was meant to be the same mercy. But twelve is the one list long enough to stall on, because unlike a colour, a mark feels like it's supposed to mean something about you. People open the picker, scroll it twice & go make a coffee. So here's the field guide we should have written first.
The unhelpful question is which one looks best. They were all drawn by the same hand to the same rules — one filled path where a filled path will do, no hatching, no fussy interior strokes, nothing that closes up when it's laid down in water-based ink at chest size. That's a deliberate flatness: it means no mark in the library out-designs another, so "best" has no answer. The useful question is narrower & much easier. What are you actually naming — a place, a thing you do there, or the people you do it with? The twelve sort cleanly into those three families, and once you know your family you're choosing between three or four, not twelve.
The first family names the ground itself. PEAKS (NO. 002) is a triple-peak silhouette cut as a single filled path with no snow strokes at all — the range as you'd draw it from memory, not from a photograph. WAVES (NO. 012) is three stroked humps with round caps, the only mark in the library drawn as line rather than mass, which is why it reads as water instead of a hill. HORIZON (NO. 004) sets a filled sun over three bars that taper as they recede, and NIGHTWOODS (NO. 007) is a tall layered pine built knockout-free so it sits on any ground without a hole punched through it. FRONDS (NO. 003) covers the cedar-shadow register — the damp, close, second-growth kind of place. If the thing you're marking is somewhere you could point to on a map, your mark is in here.
The second family names the act, not the acreage. TROUT (NO. 010) & STRIKE (NO. 008) — the fish, and the bolt, both single filled paths with a deliberately sharp read — are for water you go to with a purpose. RACK (NO. 011) is the antler register, the fall one. EMBER (NO. 005) is a flame teardrop over two plain ground lines standing in for logs: the fire, which is really the sitting-around rather than the burning. SHELTER (NO. 006) is the roof over it. And BEARING (NO. 009) — the ring, the symmetric kite needle, four cardinal ticks — is the one for movement itself, for the trip rather than the destination. This family suits people whose attachment is to a verb. They don't want the lake on their chest; they want the reason they keep driving to it.
Then there's NO. 001. LAMPFERN is the brand mark, and it names no place & no activity on purpose — which makes it the honest pick for the third case, where the thing being marked is the group. A crew, a household, a standing invitation. When a matching set goes out to eight people who share nothing geographically except each other, a landscape mark quietly makes the shirt about the landscape. The brand mark leaves the caption to do all the naming, which is usually what the caption was for anyway. It's also the right answer when you're buying for someone whose place you know but whose taste you don't.
Whichever you land on, remember the mark is the setting & not the subject. It sets the register; the line underneath does the actual naming, and the two get read together or not at all — which is why a general mark with a specific caption almost always beats the reverse. The rest is the same for all twelve: one of four inks on one of four grounds, S through 2XL, CAD $42, pressed after you design it rather than pulled from a shelf, Canadian orders pressed in Canada & US orders in the US, most arriving tracked in 5–9 business days. And the choice goes on the record — every tee pressed mints a numbered collector card noting which mark you chose and the Nth print of it in the library's history, at a permanent URL. Bearing heads this study for the obvious reason: a compass is not for deciding where to go. It's the instrument you pick up once you already know, and only need to say which way.