The first logo I ever officially designed was for myself. In 2000, I started doing some freelance design and development work. This required a name, website, and branding.
The name itself is a reference to dreams.
Original Logo
The logo, well…
In high school I was obsessed with Egyptian mythology and culture. When I was in college my mom had given me a school book ‘learning hieroglyphs” from the 1920s with translations. But the meanings have been updated since then for some symbols, and the answer key was missing for most of the homework! So I expanded my research from there, eventually moved on because the glyphs are not just pictographic, they also make sounds and to actually read hieroglyphs you need to be able to understand the Egyptian language as it was spoken thousands of years ago.
I did learn some things, however. The outer line of the logo is a cartouche. It signifies a name.
Hieroglyphs are read top to bottom and either left to right or right to left depending on what way the characters are facing. The glyphs I used are simply stacked, so they are read vertically, but since the eye is looking right, they would be read left to right if placed horizontally.
I could not find a glyph that represented “vision” as a noun. That is, thing that are seen, rather than the action of seeing them. The verb “sight” is an eye. It also means “to make or do” or “one who does”. I chose to use the Eye of Horus (known also as Wedjat) rather than a plain eye mostly for aesthetic reasons. However, it is also a common protection talisman, so I liked the double meaning.
The 3 circles in the center of the cartouche pluralize the preceding glyph. So if the eye stands for “vision”, the 3 circles make it “visions”.
The bottom glyph represents the night sky hung with stars.
So, putting them all together, the cartouche forms a *very* rough translation of “visions of night”
An if an actual Egyptologist read that they would probably shake their head sadly and tell me to stick to my day job and leave translations to people who know what they’re talking about.
The typography is set in a custom font that I designed.
Updated Logo
In 2018 I updated the logo typography. The biggest change was to the “s” design; I removed the hard lines and created a softer shape. The line weight of the graphical elements were also reduced to not compete with the text of the company name.