Two-Part Hundredth Postacular, Part Two (of Four)

See, I had all these Grand Plans, and now I just want all this anniversary crap to be over so I can get back to talking about Pokémon.

Actually, you know what, all the serious reflection I was going to do here? I'm making that the 150th post. Problem solved.

I still have some other retrospective stuff I was gonna do though. Here's the post that was going to be part three of four, promoted to part two of three. Nobody remembers part three anyway. Think about the third verse of "Amazing Grace", or "White Christmas", or any other song with at least three verses. You can't, because no one ever remembers the third part. Anyway, here's the thing.

The Many Looks of The Infinite:

The Basic:

When I came up with the basic design of this blag, there were two concepts I wanted to focus on, both of which play off the reason I picked the name: I see the Internet as a big, unending, mostly empty place. So I what wanted to do was create the illusion that you were kind of trapped or lost in an endless space. So there are a lot of ways to do that, but I decided to focus on two elements of that, 3-D and sort of "larger-than-life" (in quotes because they're not really that big). Since most fonts are viewed straight-on--note to self, design font that's viewed in profile-- the best way to show 3-D is with blur. I tried a lot of fonts and the one I decided on, oddly enough, is called Erthqake (not to be confused with the similarly-named Earthquake). Normally, it looks like this. I know. Sometimes it's the last thing you'd suspect.

To reinforce the "fog" idea, I always use grayscale colors with this one. Regular colors "pop" too much and kind of destroy the illusion of blurriness. For the same reason, this (and-

To make the letters look bigger without actually making them bigger, I made them taller, and farther apart. My goal was to make them kind of monolithic, as if they're looking down on you, but without overdoing it and looking silly.

The Speaking of Silly:

Like a lot of the alternate logos, this one has only been used once, for a few weeks around Halloween, mainly because it doesn't make sense otherwise. This was the first alternate, so I was a bit conservative about it, sticking to grayscale (albeit reversed), blur, no edges and the same font. And honestly, it's probably my favorite out of all of them. I just like the skulls (if you do too, you can get a them here).

The Guess Which Presidential Election I Used This for:

First of all, I really do love 'mrka, in a not-ironic way. Seriously, have you been to other countries? Most of them suck, especially the food. Plus everything there is really old for some reason, it's like, build some new stuff other countries! Anyway, I'm not completely satisfied with this design, which is probably the shortest-lived one (running only from Halloween to Election Day). It's bacause it has edges. I prefer logos that blend into their background, and there was just no way for that to work here. I do like the red-white-and-blue color scheme that accompanied it though.

And Then the Third Futurama Movie Came Out:

The first of many logo parodies, undoubtedly. The hard thing here was getting the colors. The blue used for the real logo just looked wrong here, and I couldn't find quite the right shades of red and yellow to make it identical. In the end I just went with what looked good over strict accuracy. This one ran for about a week, I think, though it did lead to me coming up with the phrase "RSSMatron" (look to your right if you don't get it), which I guess is remains its legacy. Also the "flash" background directly led to the next one.

The Next One:

In case you hadn't noticed, this is also the current logo, though it originally went for about a week (November 2008: Month of the Four Logos. Actually five, I think I switched out the Halloween one a little late). But it's versatile enough to be reuseable. It also fits well with my aforementioned design elements, since the light helps place the words in space, and also has a somewhat alienating effect. Hopefully).

The Shiny:

Here I wanted to use the same design ideas, but approach them in different ways. Just as with the last one, the letters are illumnitated with a light, but this time it comes from a (heavily doctored) photo. I like the bombasticness of this one-- it's infinite in its own way-- but ultimately it didn't fit.

This was my Thanksgiving one, in case you didn't guess. Like I said, Novemeber had a lot of logos, especially if you include whatever I switched to after Thanksgiving (probably the Basic one, I can't remember. Huh, I guess that actually makes six).

"Oh, You Mean Xmas":

Pretty easy one to describe. Mostly I did this one because I liked this background picture. What I like here is that there's a moodiness and atmosphere to this that most of the other logos don't have-- it's very cold in the literal sense, but figuratively still warm and inviting. At least, that's what I see in it.

Tribute to Portal One:

See, originally I'd planned to review Portal after I finished it, instead of over a month later, and I designed this based on the game's credit sequence.

Again, this approaches the "infinite" idea from a different direction. Instead of being infinite in direction or size, this one is (not literally) infinite in how many pieces it has. Sort of I did it betteron my second go-round:

My Second Go-Round:

This one combines the "many, many things" idea with the "3d" and "blur" ideas. It'd be my very most favoritest, but it's a little too complicated.

Valentimes is Special Times:Here again we see the "many, many things" idea. This logo is actually a repurposing of something I had designed earlier, something I normally wouldn't do, but I thought it worked well.

I don't really celebrate Valentime's Day, religiously or socially, so I thought it would be funny to, in contrast to that, go all out with the blog design. The background was a maroon-red-purplish (I'd call it Dark Pink, but that's actually an oxymoron, and also a good name for a rock album*), the text actually had pink links, and this huge, intentionally garish logo dominated most of the screen. Luckily I got away with it because I don't think I had readers then. Actually, I have no idea if I have readers now. If you're a reader, please leave a comment so I can get a ballpark figure. Hell, leave two.

Here's what I did for St. Patrick's Day. My favorite thing about this: no green. I mean, green is a perfectly good color, but must we always go for the cliche? Instead I went with booze, clearly making a sign for "The Infinite Bar & Grill". At least I was kind of subtle.

Of course, my original idea was to do some kind of Celtic knot design, since those already symbolize infinity. But I couldn't figure out how.

OK, that's all of them so far. We can now resume our regularly scheduled blogtivities.

*Two other good names: Self-Titled Debut and ...A Good Name for a Rock Album, if only as meta-jokes.

UPDATE 4-3:
I built this animated one using gickr (not sure how that's pronounced). Consider it a bonus. Actually, my original plan was to do an animation, but I decided it would be too distracting. Plus I can't use this one, it's too small and jerky. And I'm not sure if it even works, literally. Seemed fine earlier.