Design work of any kind is a pretty challenging endeavour and I’ve found that logo design is one of the hardest. How do you encapsulate all the feelings, goals, and aspirations of an organization in one relatively abstract icon? Right after the Tropes vs Women in Video Games Kickstarter we realized we needed to redesign our original logo so that we could create motion graphics for the new series. That process took several months, several designers, and endless iterations, but ultimately I was very happy with the results. I said yes, go, design done! Then I quickly realized, this isn’t a logo, it can’t be used as an icon, and it’s not flexible enough to put on backgrounds of different colors. Oops.
I learned from my previous mistakes. I reached out to Cory Schmitz whose work, if you are a fan of video games, you would probably recognize all over the place. I said, “Cory, make me something awesome! But that also fulfills all these criteria.” And thus began our year-long process to get to where we are today.
The current design weaves in all of the original ideas I wanted but in a subtle way, and I’ve found that everyone sees something a little bit different in it. You might see the two Fs sitting opposite each other representing our initials, or a wave pattern to signify media frequencies. You might even see talons like I initially did, or a cute little family of birds!
We experimented with many different colours and I kept gravitating back to the hot pink. Some iteration of a bright pink has been a part of our logo design since the beginning and I wanted to keep that historical thread, plus I just really like hot pink. Lastly, you might have noticed a lot of Arabic influence in our previous design. We consulted a lot of Arabic typography books to understand the beautiful written language of Arabic, and it was important to me to integrate that into this new design, too. I gravitate toward Arabic script for two reasons: 1. It was a personal nod to my family and cultural background, and 2. Because Arabic script, unlike English letters, has this incredible way of weaving together boldness and softness at the same time, embodying a complex range of qualities that feels very appropriate to the work we do.
Now that the logo is complete, we are working on designing our brand new website which will launch sometime early next year, and we are working on getting stickers and t-shirts for the many of you who have been requesting it! Be sure to follow us on Twitter and Facebook to stay up to date on all those announcements!