I read somewhere that there's supposedly a trend for
people to wear their rainbow triangles upside down, with the tip
pointing up to signify positive affirmation in place of the
defensiveness and victim mentality which the wearers feel is a
problem in the mainstream queer community. I decided to co-opt
the trend and use it for my own purposes so that maybe if the
trend gets really big someday, people might think that I started
it myself.
This is another logo I did in the summer after I
graduated from college. The most amusing thing about this picture
is that I created that cactus from a font—the
Maraca Extras font, to be exact. It's one of those pictographic
fonts like Wingdings and Webdings, and one of the characters in
it happens to be a cactus. So I typed the character for the
cactus in the largest possible font size, and then I just worked
with the texture while keeping the outline provided by the font.
I had a vector-based art program called TurboDraw that I used for the blue gradation of the sky, and I'd already drawn a pawprint for one of the other pictures on the page, so I just reused the same pawprint. Next for the window frame: I had a web page design program called Ixla which had a special option that added frames to photographs. The program was not good for much of anything else (its style of coding web pages was atrocious) but I did use it to get the outside edge of this window frame. Then I just cut and pasted the outside edge to create the crossbars. After that I used the erase function in Ixla to create a bright white sun in the upper right corner, bright enough to fade out part of the window frame. (I considered this a stroke of genius on my part—because when the sun is shining through the corner of a window it does fade out part of the window frame, and so many people who draw windows with the sun in the corner forget to depict this.
After that, all that was left was the text. I did the word "Clara" in italic First-Grader font, and "Investigations, Inc." in italic Typist font. (Funny, because neither a first-grader nor a typewriter normally has italic capability—but I wanted the forward slant anyhow.)
This is the last of the logos I designed before
actually getting internet access at home. It was part of a
control panel, with four or five matching but smaller buttons
beneath this one, leading to the different sections of my website.
It was a very cool navigation system but I eventually scrapped it
just because having to make new buttons every time I wanted to
add a new section to my website got on my nerves. I needed more
flexibility than that.
I designed this one in August 2000 as a logo for the
homepage of my Queerchoice
Mailing List. The hardest part was designing a convincing
random puddle shape which would at the same time provide just the
right amount of room for the words to fit on it. I pretty much
drew the outline freehand, and it took quite a few drafts before
I got it to a point that looked convincingly fluid to me. Then I
took the background of the website (same background as this one)
and swirled it into a spiral, then superimposed my puddle-shape
onto the spiral. The fact that the internal color swirls seem to
follow the outside edges of the puddle was really just a lucky
coincidence—I hadn't even thought about trying to accomplish
that. I just knew that I hadn't been happy with my earlier drafts,
and when I got one where the internal swirls lines up with the
outside edge of the puddle, I suddenly saw what had been missing
before and knew that I'd finally gotten it right. So anyway, all
that was left after that was to shadow the edges of the puddle to
give it a raised appearance (I find that the "Stain"
function on the Xenofex plugin for Photoshop works great for that)
and then add the text!