May 2025 - Designing A Logo
I've put this off long enough, let's just go. I don't have much of a passion for graphic design, mostly because I've rarely found the need for it myself in things that I actually know how to use. I find it's often a crutch for learning how to use software, but eventually it all goes back to API. Because of that substack thing last month, I do think I should start drafting and designing a logo, even if it won't be of the highest picture resolution. It will go very much in the way that drawing with kirta went, though hopefully I will learn to create a vector graphic at the end of it. Am I expecting to actually learn something substantial from this? Not really.
I've seen some online communities focused on designing logos and have a vague motion of how they work. However, those mostly centered on the marketing utility of a good logo, which often focused on smartly incorporating letters into a stylized graphic of some appropriate object or critter. I have no real interest in marketing, so I would be fine not implementing this approach.
The alliteration in the title of this website did give my some easy to design options that happen to look good. I can always go for a stylized "P&P", or "P2" (or maybe more aesthetic, but more nonsensical "P2"), but it probably wouldn't be wrong to attempt to sketch out a picture logo either. Which one I end up going with ultimately, I'll decide, once I've finished designing. I am going to avoid using full words in the design though, as I'm certain that wouldn't be good practice in any school of design, including ones I find interesting and harmonizing to my aesthetic.
First drafts were created in an airplane. Some of the letter-based ones look a little wonky, but that would be easily solved using an appropriate font, and I wasn't expecting my handwriting to be good enough to make a sensical logo without attempts of calligraphy which I'm not willing to attempt on a tablet. I came up with essentially these iterations on the designs.
Ultimately, if I was trying to create a logo that is readable, either of the lettered options would likely work fine, but a recognizable would probably be the drawn version. I'm not so sure about the "ink splotch" coming off of the square pixel, but I can easily decide to leave something out if I decide it doesn't work at scale.
Oddly enough, I think scaling the drawn version to a less messy and properly colour-coded version was easier than translating any of the lettered options, because I know that if I work on a big enough version, the left-over messiness will be scaled out of the picture, if I scale it back to logo-size. For now, this has to be enough, because frankly, this is only meant to show up as thumbnails. The pen for example has turned out considerably most messy, and even the pencil tip has some perspective issues, but I figured it'd be fine later. I run into an issue with the letter-placement that I clearly can't hand-pen it, and I also don't feel like I can just use pre-existing fonts, as that would feel like cheating somehow. Perhaps there are even cases where it would be cheating (i.e. usage without license) and it feels like I should avoid those scenarios.
In general, the drawn logo is perhaps a good option for now. Kind of conveys my whole "pantsing my way to the results" vibe. I feel like a more minimalist style might have agreed more with my personal aesthetic taste, but seeing as I've never been quite happy with design layout, I'll leave revision until that has been sorted and I feel like the logo is something that's actually dragging me down.
