Legacy of Play
What's With the Logo?
Did you ever have a random idea that you couldn't get out of your head? The most ridiculous, out-of-nowhere idea provides its own rationale as it lives between your ears. So it was with this logo.
Initially I was just playing around with various forms. As with most visual work, I doodled and doodled and doodled. Eventually, I started playing around with two of my favorite characters: the ambersand (&) and the question mark (?).
If you'll excuse my over-the-top nerdiness here, take a second and think about these little things: on the one hand, a visual portmanteau of the Latin word "et", and on the other a "lightning flash" to end a sentence. Beautiful! Unique! Absolutely incredible.
As I was playing with them, I realized you could flip the ampersand, and connect it to the question mark. It was a really fun corruption of those symbols, and it stuck in my brain.
At some point in a project I realized I'm losing steam—maybe it's interest, maybe time, maybe energy—and my solution to that is always the same: lower the bar, and ship. Now that I had a logo idea that I liked, I dropped it into Sketch and shipped it as fast as I possibly could. Plain color. "Good enough" Bezier curves fitting the transition between the two characters. Export to SVG. Move on.
After I deployed it, though, it haunted me a bit: did it "mean" anything? Well, no. Did it need to? Well, no. If it did, what would it?
Again, the logo doesn't mean anything. It's not special. It's an accident, and I love it. But your brain needs it to mean something. If you're like that, too, take your pick:
- If God has a favorite question, it's "And?" What a model to live up to. "Schoon, I could really use this help." Sure. And? "Schoon, this happened." And?
- "And" is always better than "but", and a question is always better than a statement.
- The URL is the backbone of the Internet, and the "query" component of the URL is how you share information via URL. What two characters provide that query structure? The ambersand and the question mark.
And now that I've published even this ridiculous screed, my brain can rest.
18th of February, 2020
