The main thing on this post's agenda is the introduction of my Z logo. While it could also be called the Z sign, Z symbol or a more traditionally sounding Z emblem, my decision to keep referring to it as a logo is solely for the sake of simplicity.
The previous Z logo was all about balance and stability in addition to reflecting the contrast of myself as a person. While all that still applies and the old logo continues to represent me in a nutshell, including the kinky endings of the Z, I have decided to design a logo from a different viewpoint.
This time the focus is not on an all-encompassing personal philosophy of life but what specific characteristics Z-LOT actually binds together, attempting to offer a satisfying answer to the question "what does it actually mean and what does it represent"?
A simultaneous creative process of first thinking and then drawing led me to my new logo. A logo that is out of balance yet still retaining its posture, that annihilates symmetry but remains proportional, a logo that is sharp and decisive, strong and still kinky, puzzling the observant viewer's mind why one part of it is hidden from plain sight - is it hiding or is it meant to be unable to grasp as a whole?
One thing about giving impressions is clear, the (3D) perspective that the logo subtly implies to be observed from is meant as a look from the ground below onto the massive kinky shape, piercing the sky above somewhere in the distance.
The logo is no longer in a square shaped frame but rather in golden ratio proportions which can be either a blessing or a curse. For me it is certainly the former since the logo was envisioned as heavily dynamic, contrary to its predecessor. An additional key benefit is the ease of its manipulability: it can be stretched, skewed and deformed in any number of ways, objects of various shapes and sizes can be added to it and finally, the clean, minimalistic shapes make recoloring process a delight.
I've spent quite some time playing with all sorts of variables, especially adding convenient square shapes to bind the logo to them. My favorite one is the combination of a red square with a black Z logo. It's made of clean lines, simplistic shapes and a radiant,colorful element that attempts to counter-balance the kinky shape and ground its swirling black tentacle.
A more square friendly yet compromising variant is the logo with a colored strip on its side. These can come in handy when it's time to express a certain mood or state of being and don't offer an appealing substitute for a square logo - I'd much rather see it stretched, oversized and cropped to fit or moved to the left side as I did with the favicon of this blog.
Overall, the move to create a new, clean logo felt like the right thing to do and it still does, especially since I managed to put own reflecting thoughts and feelings into a coherent form, calling those same reflections into memory each time I look at the sharp yet massive outline.
It is interesting to note a detail on creative process that led me to choosing such design. At first I was under the influence of old logo, constrained exclusively to straight symmetric lines. As I moved forward, nothing truly new happened until I turned the page, painted it black and made a simple white outline that completely defied the previous logo, putting it a vibrant green rectangular shape which immediately framed its perspective.
It's just the kind of feeling that I get when looking at my own logo, this time on an even more vocal level... mission successful.
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