Changes of Two Kinds: Domain and Logo

It's May and this blog is still pretty much desolated. I couldn't say that I put blogging on hold, it's the format that changed: I tweet pretty regularly. In fact, thinking about tweeting led me into believing that each tweet I make could easily be expanded into a blog post of its own, adding a cluster of content around a focal point.

That is even the purpose of some tweets - making short notes to further expand my thoughts on a specific subject later on, though turning 140 characters or less into 140 or 1400 words every time would not be the most wise idea.

Even though other issues I tweet about would certainly deserve more attention than the two I am about to mention here, I believe that they deserve mentioning simply because of their direct relation to this blog.


The first thing that I am extremely glad to announce is that I have finally taken hold of Z-lot.com domain and finally became its proud official owner!
It appears that the domain squatters who have been holding it suddenly lost interest in keeping it for another year. Perhaps the unfavorable economic climate caused them to somewhat tighten their belts. It was my fault to start with since I made a fatal mistake and created a second-level domain blog before attempting to register my own.

I still intend to keep the current Z-lot.net domain for various services, especially my mail address and services such as Calendar, Docs, Mail and Sites etc.


The second thing on this post's agenda is the redesign of my logo. The previous one 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 Z-lot 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.