My New Logo

I really dislike English class. I don’t dislike learning English, obviously, nor do I have any grudge against literacy or writing. What I really, absolutely cannot stand is the mind-numbing amount of thought that almost every English instructor I’ve ever had puts into a book which the author would have obviously not even suspected he meant to put into his writing.

I once had an English teacher at Stuyvesant who insisted with utmost sincerity that the character Kurtz of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness was so named because of its supposed phonetic similarity to “Christ.” Furthermore, Okonkwo of Achebe’s Things Fall Apart has his name originate from our subconscious understanding of long, “masculine” vowel sounds. How could a syllable be masculine?

Her most far-fetched comparisons, which she dispensed daily with an unconquerable, belittling sneer, were the only ones which could match in tenuity to this little headdesk I was subjected to in junior year: “The jolly baker down the street has elected to use powdered sugar instead of granulated sugar. What do you think the author intended by such a decision fraught with between-the-lines intention?”

NOTHING. The author intended nothing!

So when I decided to create a new avatar for myself, my traumatizing experiences with English class led to me write the following disclaimer: “I intended my work to be experienced as it has been created. I enjoy the way it looks, and this work has no further meaning beyond its initial appearance.”

Then I looked at my new piece of work, the Outline:

Yes, I did make it the way it is because it looks nice. But it very obviously contains additionally meaning, much of it inherited from its sire, the Stuyvesant Techtonics (Stuy Tech/Techtie) logo (the Tech):

I wanted to retain the nature of my work, the hexagonal power button symbol that represents the melding of electronics and mechanics that is robotics. I discarded the dramatic red bar, standing out starkly against the black and white, because that was what Techtonics was when I made the logo—a bold sliver of a team, surrounded by uncreative soulless career-seekers. But I do not need such an iconoclastic representation; I’m a pretty quiet guy. Besides, taking out the red just makes it work better for my website. I removed the sharp caps in the bar and the five-sixths hexagon as well. Techtonics was an intense, competitive team; I am a person.

Of course, this means that I will be finally phasing out the remnants of my previous logo, the Indoor:

which has made its presence known only in its favicon form , which is now replaced with . The new logo resized surprisingly well.

Previous iterations of the Indoor have looked like so:

That last one is from 2003 or 2004. I believe I stole it from another website, because I remember it as originally animated. Please forgive me, other website. I was young, and you have done me a great service for the original art that has served me for so long. However, scioly.org, which is where I first began to use it, had and still has a very strict requirement on avatar file sizes, due to hosting costs. I cut all but one frame from it and simplified the palette. I eventually shaped the frame to look like my own planes, and animated the image once more to arrive at the final product, but I still wonder how the original looked…

Also, I found this amusingly terrible GIF bunched with the collection that the Indoor came from:

Wow. The things I did at the age of 13.

Now, you might ask, why do I need a personal logo? I really don’t. I don’t have that much of an ego to want a pictograph that represents me. The real issue was that I was using my Techtonics logo everywhere; my Gravatar, my chat services, my computer login, etc. It was my only work of art that was at all notable. In fact, it was my only work of art that could be said to be a work of art.

However, I didn’t agree with the new Techtonics leadership after I left and they took the team over. I took issue with their interpretation of the principles of Techtonics (which is that there are none), as well as the low priorities they placed upon the various activities Techtonics traditionally participated in. I didn’t want to be using the same logo that represented people with whom I disagreed.

And that is how I know I am not an English teacher. My little picture actually represents real live people now.