Today I successfully1 complete 21 years of my presence. Over these many years, I have developed a huge portfolio of short-lived hobbies and interests2 — and have repeatedly found myself most drawn to building things. The thing about things is that they are concrete — so no matter how good they seem in one’s imagination, their touch and feel always have an unavoidable impact on one’s perception of them. The presentation of many of these things3 — websites, apps, clubs, projects — is not really complete without a single illustrative identity. This identity is their logo, which is what I want to talk about today.
Logos are fascinating. The question of whether a logo is good or bad is not even the most important one. I have often found that the mere existence of a logo makes a bold statement about whether one is really serious about their thing — and that they are willing to put in the effort to leave its impression in the minds of others. Of course, when the logo is good4, these efforts will be successful. As far as I am concerned, I have had to create logos for many of my things whether I liked it or not. As I turn 21 today, I realize that the logos that I have created have a story to tell and are in fact an integral part of my presence. Take for instance the following logo which I probably designed on Microsoft Paint™ for a hypothetical study-resources website when I was roughly 10 years old. My dad brought me a diary while I was sick and I drew the first version of this logo on its first page.

Thankfully this concept did not get far enough for me to waste my parents’ money on a domain name — most likely because all I knew was how to draw a logo (if at all) and nothing about how to actually build my website. Over time I may have picked up a skill or two, sufficient to create at least somewhat primitive products, but more often than not I have found myself creating logos before starting on the actual product — almost using my logos as a scratchpad for thinking about what the product should offer5. For instance, consider the following logo which I designed for a social media platform that I wanted to build in 2017. I had nothing new to offer by the way — I was creating a Facebook clone6, which sounded pretty exciting to me at the time. And it just sounded exciting because eventually, I spent too much time designing the perfect login page and lost interest after struggling to create only a prehistoric chat feature and a public bulletin.

Even after realizing that this was not going anywhere, that simple (and rather unoriginal) hashtag logo became my pet penchant to the point that I started making it a part of every other thing I would create for a while — as if building an empire behind the brand of my fallen social media platform. Two of the most notable instances of this are the following.


Of course this time I was relatively more thoughtful about my designs. The red shield with the hashtag in the middle was supposed to represent cybersecurity — for my cybersecurity education game. The cube, with admittedly too many small details, was supposed to represent a social platform for local clubs and events. At some point I lost the original high-resolution file for the hashtag, and too lazy to recreate it, I abandoned the hashtag altogether7. This started with the blue newspaper with checkmarks, for a news verification platform, and the smartphone on a map, for a platform for local businesses.


Sometimes some of our things may have to be sunsetted in spirit — although the infrastructure created around them may still be useful. Changing logos becomes an important part of changing identities. A glaring example of this is a blog I started with some friends back in 2019. We were inspired by the raging popularity that online articles were receiving, and we thought we could also hop on this bus ride to Internet fame. Turns out that one needs to know what they are going to write about, and this soon became our biggest bottleneck. We started with science- and technology-related articles — but couldn’t offer any new perspective without any knowledge of our own! Eventually, I started posting random reflections and non-technical articles8, soon rebranding the blog with a more abstract-looking name and logo.


As someone with no design background, I find it hard to make logos — or judge whether they are good or bad. Yet this has been incredibly difficult to avoid. When I joined University, I envisaged working on deeper things — what I had heard of as “research” — that would need no fancy introduction because their audience would be limited to boring people like me. While I have learned from my little experience in research that this is not true, there have been other instances where I have been pulled into creating logos at University — student clubs! All of these are fun stories in themselves, but while I promise to write about them in the future, I will part with one of my favorite brags on campus. I have designed logos for three clubs in my University — and while I write this post, there is at least someone on campus wearing merchandise from each of these clubs with my logo on it.



Let us end with something motivational. How about this — If I can design logos9, so can you!
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I am giving myself the benefit of the doubt. ↩
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And delusions, confusions, underestimations, overestimations, and so on. ↩
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Unfortunately, I can no longer create websites or apps, and can no longer manage clubs. However, fortunately, my 21 years of experience allow me to continue to speak on such matters without having to admit my lack of competence. ↩
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I am not a designer. Let me repeat — I have no idea what good logo design is! As such, this question is very hard to answer, and so I will not address it in this post. ↩
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I think I was practicing Structured Procrastination in most of these moments (just as I am right now), but come on — what I said definitely sounds more inspirational! ↩
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At the time, the phrase in my mind was Facebook alternative. ↩
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Possibly for the better! ↩
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I can do that on this blog because I never really promised anything — gotcha! ↩
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Albeit flawed, but as I said, a bad logo is better than no logo at all! ↩