The New New - Logo
Updated: Mar 8, 2022
It is unclear to me why I didn't realize that at the same time as I wanted to completely rebuild my blog itself, I probably should also replace my 131-week-old logo and accompanying branding…
Don't get me wrong - I love my old logo! It was one of the first times I embraced my full last name as part of my brand, and marks a really wonderful time in my design life. It's just that I have outgrown the standard 'Pinterest hand lettering'-style font, I've come to find the whole thing harder to read as my eyes age, and I'm kind of tired of looking at the boring black or white colors all over everything.
I knew I didn't want to stop using my full name - in fact I wanted it even easier to read and more prominent. My last name isn't as difficult as people's eyes first tell them it is, it's pronounced phonetically thanks to its Japanese origin, and exactly 50% of the letters are vowels with no trickery. I grew up with people making fun of it, being lazy about trying to pronounce it, fetishizing it, the works, and for a very long time I couldn't *wait* to get married to someone with a hopefully shorter and easier to pronounce name so that I could finally shed this burden for good.
It's not a coincidence that I made this new logo in 2017. That year was the year that Uzo Aduba spoke up for all of the kids with "weird" names and shared her childhood lesson of
"If they can learn to say Tchaikovsky, and Michelangelo, and Dostoyevsky - then they can learn to say Uzoamaka."
That was when I really started to figure out what my name meant to me, and have become incredibly proud of it - unisex first name and scary-looking last name and all. I even plan to hyphenate when I get married for a number of reasons (forms be damned)!
I also wanted to make my logo more personal than just shouting my awesome name from the rooftops, but wasn't sure how that was going to play out. Was I going to put a cactus in there, or an orchid or a poppy, or maybe something mystical or celestial? Nothing felt right and I kind of stumbled upon the idea of putting a likeness of myself in on accident while looking for mystical design inspiration.
All in all I love this thing so much - it feels like a natural next generation of my previous logo and matches my identity in a new way. I'm excited to be getting back out there and be building a blog I will love running for years to come.
