I’ve not done something of this sort in a while, and I’m rather rusty.
I was doodling during a particularly boring talk a while ago, and ended up drawing something that I knew I wanted to base this site’s future logo on. It’s based on a mechanical pencil whose lead I’d aimlessly shaved to behave like a calligraphy pen. I decided to slowly transfer it onto the computer, rather than arbitrarily idle while waiting for some simulations to complete. What I’ve shown below is a start.
Before you laugh, let me remind you this was done without a mouse, and just a touchpad. Try it.
And here it is in a vector format: actuality-logo.blog.svg, in case you want to try your hand at modifying it or something.
IMO, there was some kind of a rhyme between this logo and an image I had seen elsewhere. And now I remember, it’s http://www.abisource.com. Curious, would the Abisource favicon suit actuality.log better?
Probably, but it’s not something I came up with. And though their logo is nice, it has too many colour gradients going on, which detract from what I was primarily shooting for, a simple 2-colour logo.
Rather than go off into why theirs wouldn’t work, I think it’d suffice to say it’s not mine and get into some of the inspiration/design goals behind this logo.
o It, obviously, had to look like an ‘A’, or ‘a’. The thing I’d drawn up on paper looked more like an ‘A’, but this came out to be more subtle.
o Apart from being simple (to end up on T-shirts for cheap, or whatever), it had to clearly represent calligraphy, because that was what inspired it in the first place. And the reason it had to represent calligraphy was because it had to represent “beautiful writing”. That doesn’t necessarily mean good content, just pretty writing.
o There is also a subtle reference to the current way I wear my hair implied in this logo. Not that that’s important, but it is an often brought up subject on the journal, so seemed fitting.