The New Brand

In my notes from 1997 and 1998 I found this graphic from the last days of Fractal Design, immediately after the merger with MetaTools, and the start of the newly-formed company, which was to be called MetaCreations. It shows my irreverent take on typography, with letters verging on an alien alphabet. Perhaps this was my thinking in those days, clearly influenced by Star Trek: The Next Generation design and increasingly beginning to think that aliens were taking over my company.

The graphic was a last hurrah, buried in my logo-search stack. These were the papers that detail the search for a new company name and logo, begun as a result of merger. Those were turbulent days, full of interesting ideas that never made it. Here is another little sketch from that collection of the doodles drawn in those days when the meetings were long and the bickering was uncomfortable. I was already thinking about the metaphors for the idea processor.

Name search

First came the name search. The first edict, from John Wilczak (the MetaTools CEO and soon to be replaced) was that the name should contain "Meta". Once you put that flag in the ground, there are only so many names that can be chosen. We all bought into it.

John Derry and I thought up several meta-rooted names for the company. We centered around various concepts, like making: names like metaforge, metafactory, and metaforce. We also tried words around branding: names like metabrand, metaware, metafactor, and metacraft. Next we covered concept names like metapath, metaform, and metadesign. Of course, we also looked at location names like metaworld, metastage, metasphere, metawave, and metalevel. Combination names sometimes became useful, like metalith and metastar. We were going for simplicity and pith.

We had a hundred names to choose from, and three or four made the top of the list. But it turned out that they were always taken by one company or another, and so proved themselves to be unsuitable for our purposes.

In the end, the root word meta (meaning "on another level") was merged with "create" and we somehow found MetaCreations as our new name. We worked out the typestyle, using a PR branding firm called 30SIXTY, contracted by Sallie Olmstead. The result was a very good type treatment. One of their designs stuck, seen here. MetaCreations passed the trademark search and so we found ourselves in the position of needing a good catchphrase to go with it.

Catchphrase and Logo

At this point, we hired a new CEO and the branding began afresh. This cast us into disarray: the implications of three separate groups pushing in different directions. Let me introduce you to the three groups:

One group was Gary Lauer's group. Gary was the new CEO, hired by the board and taking on the challenge of merging two cultures with a third culture of his own. The second group was Kai Krause's group. Kai was the design thinker from MetaTools and the creative face of the company. The third group was John Derry and myself, Mark Zimmer. But, frankly, I took the lead because I was the representative to the logo group. As you will see, the three groups couldn't agree less. And yet we eventually found a logo. Here I show a doodle from a page drawn during the endless logo meetings.

The catchphrase Gary preferred was staid and traditional: The Visual Computing Software Company. The logos from his group were not unlike the ones from Claris in style. The other two groups saw the logos as pedestrian and frankly uninteresting. Here you can see one of the color schemes of his final logo set. The earlier ones were considerably more amateurish. This one features an M-shape with a bit of a shine nestling into it. My comments on this particular logo are unprintable, sadly: I will leave them to your imagination. Kai felt pretty much the same about this logo.

The catchphrase Kai preferred was genuinely clever: where great ideas are born. Also, John Wilczak, before he left, preferred start the migration, though I'm still not sure where he was going with that one. The logos from Kai's group initially centered on an egg - with the idea of hatching a new idea. Other groups just kept thinking "Meta lays an egg" as the headline. After a brief trademark search, we discovered Software Ventures had an egg with a shadow as its logo, and that was the final crack.

In the sessions for my group, John and I tossed around the creativity concept endlessly. One catchphrase was bringing creativity to you. Another was changing the way people think. Our final try was sparking your creativity. While fascinating and very ambitious, I still think Kai's catchphrase was best. Our logo designs centered on a hand - for software that was human-centric. The hand was the artist's signature from the days of the cave-painters. Other groups just saw "stop" - a hand telling you not to enter. Here, we placed it inside an oval form to suggest an egg.

All three groups had a basic problem - the other two groups opposed their design. So Gary, thinking his group was more equal than the other two, decided to make a presentation of his logo. Allowing us to choose the color scheme. Ah, that was a rough meeting.

This required Kai and I to work together on a new logo. I dredged up an old design: the trefoil knot. I had made this design in 1983 when working as a consultant for Auto-Trol (I was building them a 3D system for computer-aided engineering). I had resurrected this design when working on Detailer, the 3D Paint Program, adding a mirrored surface to it. Here we see a small version of this knot, produced in Detailer using a brassy look. Kai's people used Bryce to create a much cleaner, smoother nicely-tilted version of this knot, and added a slight soft shadow underneath it.

This shadow was eventually omitted and the catchphrase was changed once again.

This time I wasn't asked. As you can see, it became The Creative Web Company. The times were changing, and at this time, before the dot-com boom and collapse, everything had to be  naively covered with web-web-web. The trefoil knot had a nice reflection and self-shadowing, though. Kai and I approved the form.

After Kai and I decided to redesign the logo, he had his people design some new forms. Many of them were based on threefold symmetry, which I also tend to prefer. One designer, Athena Kekenes, produced some iconic figures that still hold up today. The first figures were triangular-symmetry organic forms that had a very interesting, yet somehow alien, lilt to them. With tree-like branching properties and spherical ends, it looked a bit like some strange form of sea-weed. You can see one of the designs here. We asked for some more ideas.

One was a cube that had a sphere subtracted from it. This, when viewed from the direction of a corner, had a six-fold symmetry that was quite pleasing.

Here you can see the cube, with the sphere subtracted. With Boolean operations in Bryce, this stuff just jumped right out of the imagination into the page.

When you look at it, it's a bit busy. It has a shadow, the three visible sides of the cube have different shades. The sphere has gradations. The objects even shadows itself!

I'm sure this is what Kai and Athena were thinking when they came up with the simpler version of the logo.


Here we can see the flower logo. It's very clean, simple, stylistic, and suggestive of 3D.

Negative space is used in two ways: the sphere is negative space when subtracted from the cube, and the flower is the result of looking through the negative space of the 3D form and coloring in the holes.

In some way, though, we found these cube-based logos to be too derivative of the Silicon Graphics logo. I even found the SGI logo in my notes right next to this one.

Kai's group never really gave up on the egg, until the trefoil knot became our focus. By that time we were tired of the process of logo search.

Here is an egg-derived logo that used the shape several times in negative and positive space to form an op-art logo. This held up better because it could be reproduced in black-and-white. As any good logo should.

But eventually we centered on the trefoil knot. It's iconic form was clear. Before any of his people had a chance to perfect the trefoil with reflections and shadows, he had his people do special black-and-white versions of the trefoil.

This version is exceptionally clever, using rotated versions of the knot silhouette in alternating colors, then subtracting out the middle.

Though we liked the line art reproduce-ability of this form, we thought it looked a bit too much like the woolmark logo.

In all, we spent too much time working on the logo. Gary, in his desperation, did an end-around and created his own logo and placed it on our products. This was done because, after all, we had to have something to put on shipping products. This was another logo based on the M (and, it seems, on Freddy Krueger).

As you can see, Gary even replaced the typeface we selected! His quest for a unified package design was next. This actually made us mad, because each product was a brand of its own and the entire concept of unified product packaging design seemed wrong.

What did we do to deserve this?

In all, I wasn't really satisfied with what came out of this process. Personally, I doubt Kai was either. Meta continued to create great products, nonetheless. Bryce, Painter, KPT, and Poser saw fantastic new versions. And Ray Dream Designer metamorphosed into Carrara, which was a very ambitious project and a great product in its own right.

And I just kept drawing new iconic logo designs. I knew that someday they might be useful to me. And someday the story would be told.

Iconic Things

The pursuit of simplification of a drawing or a concept is a very useful tool. You can get to the heart of an idea really quick by distilling it into its purest form. This is one dependable way in which you can tell if its a good or a bad idea.

An Iconic Knot

I was writing a blog post on knots when I began thinking about how simple a depiction of a knot could be. For me, the simplest knot is the overhand knot. I don't think a knot can be simpler than that one.

So the first thing I did was to draw it in several forms. The one I preferred was the pretzel format used by bakers in Europe. This presents it in the most readable format.

Here is my initial sketch of the overhand knot. Aside from some clumsy shading and a few thick spots, this one seemed to have the right proportions at least.

When designing a logo, the first thing is to make the figure into the simplest line art you can get away with. This meant removing the extra space of the loops (really this is tightening the knot). And it also meant losing the shading, but not the essential feeling of intertwining. So I used some tracing paper to make a crisp black-and-white version of the knot.

Here you see the second iteration of the knot. All elements of shading have been removed. The only thin lines are the ones that lead us to believe it is intertwined. The lines lead us to feel the overlap and the 3D precedence of the rope. But only that. There is nothing else left. A uniform thickness is used for the rope, and the outline is carefully moulded to give the impression of a smooth figure.

Even the place where the strands touch, in the center, has been simplified into what I believe is its simplest form. This iconic knot is a perfect stepping stone for other depictions.

For instance, I can color the knot to give it a playful design. Like the logo for a yarn company, this piece really exudes creativity and simplicity. Perfect for a crafts company.

Another possible departure from the clean logo-form is the woodcut, shown at the top. This one was inverted from the hand-colored logo form and then shading lines were cut into the form to give it a rough feeling of a linoleum cut.

For the original knot, I used a Sharpie on thick cotton bond paper, scanned it into Preview on Lion, and left it unmodified so you could see what I actually had to work with. For the logo form in black and white, I used another think piece of cotton bond paper and a sharpie to trace it. Then I scanned it into Preview and color corrected and rotated it. Then I brought it into Painter as a .jpg file and hand-edited it into the form you see here. I didn't do anything to clean up or flatten the black areas. They still had various shades of black in it from the Sharpie.

To color the second version, I used a New Layer set up with the Screen layer method in Painter. And then I drew into the black areas. The white areas are essentially left untouched by this method even if you intrude into them.

The woodcut was inverted in Painter and this produced the dirty white you see, which I liked and kept around. I added the tiger-stripe shading using lots of handwork with the goal of making it feel like a woodcut or a linoleum cut. I used my clever techniques from my scratchboard days to get the feeling right. In some cases I had to work and rework the shading stripes when they didn't fit. But I was going for an informal, hand-made look.

Iconic Forms

I like to investigate form in 3D, and the knot is certainly a way of looking at 3D forms in a new way. After all, with some slight modifications, the knot could be made into an iconic trefoil knot as well. Perhaps in my next post. A class 3D form is the cuboctahedron.

Here you see I drew a cube in perspective and then inscribed a cuboctahedron, bounded by squares and triangles. This form has 14 faces all made up of regular polygons. And since it is regularly convex, you can see seven of them here.

Shade it and you can see the form more clearly. But I think I will have to remove the lines of shading in order to simplify it more.

I love these forms. For a more complete exposition of them, see this link.

Iconic Sayings

I have noticed a lot of bands with the word One in them. In particular One Republic and One Direction, to mention just two. But it reminds me how easy it is to create iconic sayings by using the word One. As for me, I have only one eye that really works properly. But the catchphrase One Eye would not be truly great for a band. But One Vision would. Also things like One Leg would similarly not be good, being less preferable than One Step Ahead, or even One Step Behind.

In the iconic image category, One Vision leads to the all-seeing eye. This symbol, used on the dollar bill, is the symbol for vision in the larger sense. Rather than depict it as a pyramid, I have removed the third dimension and so I show it inside a triangle. Once again, it is black and white with hard edges: line art.

The eye is shiny, of course, and this is indicated by the triangular divot taken out of the iris form. The rounded form of the eye is reversed out from its triangular enclosure. Size-wise it intersects the edge and so leaves its full extent to the imagination. A clever design trick. This image may also be colored. I would suggest the iris. But this may lead to the pupil becoming colored, which will be wrong, since it must be left black. So I have left this logo form completely uncolored. Or, you can color the whole thing in a Pantone shade.

Also along these lines, the phrase One Lie occurred to me. And immediately a symbol occurred to me: a hand with the index and middle fingers crossed. Kind of a white lie, a fib.

Even such simple concepts can be iconized into a line art form, as seen here. It probably couldn't get much simpler without losing something.

Still, iconic catchphrases such as One Voice don't immediately bring an image to mind even though it is a good kernel of a thought.

Iconic Hand

The symbolic hand reaching up for help is another icon I have sought to create. I like hands, so this one seemed like a good choice.

To create the symbolism of reaching up, I wanted the hand to shadow itself and have light leak through the fingers. The light from above symbolizes hope.

The hand reaching symbolizes need, and desperation. Grasping for straws.

Here I took a photo with my iPhone, imported it directly into Preview, and saved it to a .jpg file for import into Painter. Once in Painter, i cloned it and created a line drawing. This line drawing was adjusted again and again until it seemed reasonable to my eyes. Then created a New Layer, made its layer method Gel, and used a shade of brown to add shading to the hand, using the original photo as a reference.

I did this again with a slightly redder brown, and created a darker shading layer on top. Finally, I processed the original image into a set of grainy splotches using soften and equalize. I did this repeatedly, adjusting the equalize levels so I got just the right amount of flecks of texture. Then I edited the texture image so it only covered the hand. I placed it on top as another layer and used the Darken layer method with a very small opacity to make the texture subtle enough so it wouldn't detract from the theme.

This piece is intended to be expressive, and gritty. But really only the hand form and position is iconic.

Iconic Texture

When John Derry and I used to talk about textures, one texture he liked to draw was what he called the Good 'n' Plenty texture. This was made up of lozenges placed in such a pattern so they avoided each other in a pleasing visual way.

These kinds of textures get even more interesting when the figure has a direction to it, like a triangle. So even a texture can be shown in a basic, minimalist way. The ultimate minimalist texture is the speckle, introduced and explained in the post Texture, Part 1.

Iconization

In short, the boiling down of an idea into its component parts, the exclusion of the unnecessary ones, and the most economical depiction of what's left forms the entire process of iconization. Sometimes all you have left is a silhouette. Sometimes it is a clean rendering. But always, it evokes a single iconic idea.

Iconic Bestiary - More Like This

In this blog, I have presented many iconic items. In Interlock, Part 2, I presented the iconic three intersecting rings, the atomic rings.

The post An Anatomy of Painter's Brushes, Part 3 contains a very nice iconic brush stroke, complete with grain.

In the post New Ideas, Old Ideas pretty much every picture is an iconic depiction of something.

The entire post Drawing On Your Creativity is about iconic depictions in 3D forms, many of them impossible figures.

My post on Color is filled with the iconic color overlap diagrams. Most of the figures in Interlock (the original post) are extremely iconic, and especially the Valknuts.

My post The Things We Throw Away has the iconic floating mountain.

It is clear that Art From Deep Inside The Psyche draws on all my inner troubles to produce the most interesting of all the iconic figures, some with variations, that I produced in the 90s.

My article Where Do Ideas Come From? contains a wealth of iconic imagery, from lightning bolts to letterforms.

In Patterns, Part 3 I explore the iconic looping structures and show a grammar to construct them.

In the post The Most Useful Painter Feature, the whole concept of X2 is iconized and presented in many ways.

My post on Three-Dimensional Thinking has some very clean, iconized items.

An interesting iconic item, the burning ice cube, was covered in extenso in Creativity and Painter, Part 3.