exodrifter logo

Jan 02, 20242 min read

new business cards

Two business cards on a black surface. The first one shows the front of the business card is a logo, which combines the letters 'x' and 'o' with a tilde in white on a purple-gray background. It's slightly overlapping the second card that is flipped over to show the back of the business card, which reads "ava pek" and "exodrifter.space" on lines separated by two cocentric squares rotated so that their corners point to the edges of the card.

I updated my logo quite some time ago, and I hadn’t gotten new business cards to replace my old ones until now. I’m going to hand these out at in-person playtests and at meetups!

When I first adopted my current username, I wanted to create a logo that used deconstructed elements of my username. One of the considerations I made when choosing my username is that I wanted to have a short way of representing it:

  • xo: represents “exo”, but also “hugs and kisses” (I’m secretly quite affectionate)
  • ~, like a squiggly line that wanders here and there, it represents “drifter” (in my formative years, I never felt like part of a group and I tended to drift between cliques)

So xo~ means my username, exodrifter. The logo design I subsequently came up with in 2017 looked like this:

The first logo design, which features three lines. Two lines have one right-angle bend and are placed parallel to each other, each rotated 180 degrees away from each other, with the longest sides facing each other. The third line is a tilde with the ends exaggerated to cross the first two lines. The entire arrangement is rotated 45 degrees.

The logo was a really awkward shape; I found it difficult to incorporate it on my website, place it along with other graphical elements, and make it legible when scaled down to fit in a small icon. It felt a bit like a boot spur made out of thin wire that was hard to see and poked into everything around it. It’s also not entirely clear where the various deconstructed elements went. It used to be clear to me and ambiguous enough that I liked it — but then I forgot, so I guess it was too ambiguous. I can’t explain it to you consistently even if you asked me now. At least the tilde seems obvious. 😅

It wasn’t until last year the year before last (in 2022) that I finally decided to update the logo to this:

A logo which combines the letters 'x' and 'o' with a tilde in white on a purple-gray background.

I like this design better. The form is more compact and legible, and it incorporates one additional meaning: the forward diagonal stem of the x is re-used to make up the first part of the tilde, which leaves the backward diagonal stem of the x as a unique element in the logo. This can be read together with the o to denote a 1 and 0 respectively, representing binary. You know, because I’m a software developer. HACKING IN PROGRESS

You might also notice the particular color choice. It’s not particularly colorful, but it has a meaning too. I’ll leave it up to you to decode what that means, if you’d like (the hex color code for it is #786f7e).

Crossposts

Backlinks