Personal Logo Refresh

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As I'm updating my personal collateral, I decided to take another look at my "easel" logo that I designed back in 2001. I've posted a few iterations of it below.

Sometimes clients want the logo to do everything - to contain and represent all aspects of their business and brand. That's asking a lot of a tiny little graphic! I typically steer clients away from the "kitchen sink" frankenlogos. But, it's hard to eat your own dog food sometimes, and in my case, it does actually represent what I'm about professionally.

The initial concept (see the bottom image) represented my process (drawing, sketching, etc.), the easel (the art & craft of presenting), the retro TV (video and animation) and the cursor (representing interactive, circa 2001).

Fig. 1. This is my "2013 Update" final version. I dropped the TV (too many shapes), and thought, "hey, this looks sort of like an iPad or iPhone!" and the TV knob moved to the 'navel' position for a nice tablet shape. As I would love to develop more on touch devices, this is a perfect element to help modernize the logo.

I also opened up the paper shapes – "open" beats "closed" (no, not talking Open Source here) every time, when it comes to shapes.

Fig. 2. I started this direction when I was considering how to make a tiny favicon of this: how can this be simplified? What's it look like only 16px square?

Filling in shapes and removing the TV 'screen' solved several issues with clutter. How far can this be reduced? What can be eliminated or simplified?

Fig. 3. My first update, done last year, removed the cursor, which really spoke to a bygone era of interactive work – the desktop. The era of the mouse is ending. I had considered a fingerprint, or a hand; but these were complex shapes that wouldn't hold up well at small sizes or low resolutions.

The "a" was introduced to replace it, representing my love of typography and my first initial. It's also the starting point, the alpha – my favorite part of the creative process, where anything is possible.