My problem raises from the fact that I don’t have a vertical interest in anything. Well, yes, there are fields that sees me more “present” in some ways, but in the end they’re quite wide.

Having many interests and many things to be passionate about may seem a good thing. Well, it is, from a personal point of view. But from a communication point of view it’s a big issue. You can say you’re a programmer or a graphic designer in 140 chars, but trying to express all the complexity behind different passions is hard.

It’s also hard for other two reasons:

• profession: if you’re a vertical kind of person it’s easy to communicate yourself, so when someone “needs” someone like you, it’s easy that you’re the one that will be called.
• time: pursuing different interests is very enriching, but it takes a huge amount of time.

The simple answer is that I often “choose” between the different skills I have. Sometimes “I’m the interaction designer”. Some other times “I’m the developer”. Some other times “I’m the graphic designer”. And so on.

So, I’ve tried to think about something else. I’ve tried to abstract a bit.

Smart?

Many people tell me that I’m quite smart. Even if this were true – I leave this as an exercise for the reader ;) – you can’t tell anybody “I’m smart”. That’s a really bad presentation and it usually triggers a response very different to the one you’d like to have. In fact, “smartness” can’t be communicated, but only acknowledged.

Discarded.

Hypercritical?

The piece by John Siracusa “Hypercritical” in May 2009 was something that really made me thinking.

This acute awareness of deficiencies colors all my memories of childhood. Toys, in particular, were a focal point of dissatisfaction. I didn’t understand why toy manufacturers couldn’t see the countless ways that their products differed from the on-screen characters, machinery, or structures that they were based on.

I felt very similar to Siracusa here. But still there were two problems:

1. Being “hypercritical” isn’t a flattering explanation, by itself.
2. It still didn’t felt quite right.

Discarded.

Doubt?

I love doubt, by itself. I think that doubting is the driver of improvement. If you don’t doubt, you’ll never think that “maybe there’s a better way”. If you’re sure, there’s nothing more to add. Slip in some doubt and voilà, you are able to make the right question.
As you can see, the philosphy is interesting… but “doubt” by itself isn’t a skill!

Discarded.

Synthesizer?

No, not the musical instrument. I once thought about myself that my rational part is a huge synthesizing machine. I throw things inside it and it loves to find relations, abstract things, reduce to single words or sentences, etc.

There are many things that could reinforce this hypothesis:

1. I’m fast in remembering paths and I draw mental maps of the places where I pass through.
2. In any situation I’ll try building up an “abstract” structure to hold anything together.
3. I often use this ability passively, simply acquiring information (lot of) and notions in order one day to elaborate a result.

Yes, I’m sure to be quite good at this.

But still, the term is awkward.

Discarded.

More abstraction, less abstraction

I needed something more concrete than the “synthesizer” line of thought and something more abstract than the simple profession. In the meantime I was also thinking about the logo and I was analyzing the lists as I’ve explained in the post about the making of the logo of Intense Minimalism.

During this time I was also looking at the “lists” on Twitter that has me added. It’s quite interesting: interaction design, usability, social media, graphic design, user experience, speaker, tech, geek, and so on (yes, Twitter Lists are probably more useful to see how the others “categorize” you).

Then the “synthesizer” thing jumps in. I wrote the formula:

It’s nice. Complex, but simple in its form. Disciplines above the line and approach below. Simplicity is the result of some kind of complexity synthesis, so together they’re a pair.

Double checking

I think that the “Hybrid  Designer Formula” above is quite on spot, and it’s confirmed by some other sources.

Simplicity is something all around in the design field, almost in any kind of design.

Progress means simplifying, not complicating
— Bruno Munari

The simplest way to achieve simplicity is through thoughtful reduction.
— John Maeda, Law 1

Simplicity is a function of your scarcest resource at that moment.
— B.J. Fogg (2009)

Complexity is also there, while its important role isn’t always acknowledged.

Good displays of data help to reveal knowledge relevant to understanding mechanism, process and dynamics, cause and effect.
— Edward Tufte (2005)

The most important part is the relation between the two:

Simple design, intense content.
— Edward Tufte (2005)

Simplicity and complexity need each other.
— John Maeda, Law 5

The three elements above works in the means of the two below the fraction. Their interaction isn’t obvious sometimes, but it’s there. You have a technology, you have people (psychology), you have to make them interact somehow (design).
This is true for architects, industrial designers, visual designers, artists, engineers, while probably any of them will tell you a different story from a different point of view.

The term “Hybrid Designer” emphasizes the cross-relation between different fields. Still, it’s just for communication’s sake: for me, a good designer already does this. And the greatest already do and teach this. Any good designer must be intrinsically hybrid.

Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while.
— Steve Jobs

A designer is a planner with an aesthetic sense.
— Bruno Munari

More emotions is better than less
— John Maeda, Law 7

Good design is aesthetic
The aesthetic quality of a product is integral to its usefulness because products we use every day affect our person and our well-being. But only well-executed objects can be beautiful.
— Dieter Rams, Ten principles for good design

We as designers … we cannot do it alone, we need entrepreneurs, working together with good engineers.
— Dieter Rams (2009)

The more you feel that you can control your environment, and that the things you do are actually working, the happier you are
— Joel Spolsky (2000)

If you can design one thing, you can design everything.
— Massimo Vignelli

So, I can now explain something about me and my professional side in 140 characters.

I think that it’s, for now, a good way to tell something about me.

• What do you think?
• What about you and your identity? How have you solved this problem?

As you might guess by this, I’m also a logo lover.

What is a logo?

A logo is a form of expression, it’s a sign that maximizes a specific meaning (signified) while it minimizes the number of strokes (signifier) to represent it. As you can see: it’s intense and minimalist.

For me, the platonic idea of a logo is represented by a circle:

The circle is a very strong symbol. The one above is an ensō, by Kanjuro Shibata XX. “Ensō” is a japanese word that means “circle”. It symbolizes enlightenment, strength, elegance, the Universe, and the void. In Zen Buddhist painting, ensō symbolizes a moment when the mind is free to simply let the body/spirit create.

As you might guess, the circle symbol is so strong and so common that you can hardly build a logo with “just” it. But for me, it shows the characteristic a logo should have:

1. Simple: fewer lines is better.
2. Self-contained: it doesn’t need anything else to “stand” in a page, on a website, etc.
3. Balanced: it’s well distributed on the two spatial dimensions.

Some examples:

My first logo

When I was a kid sometimes I picked up a paper and started thinking about a “logo” for me. At first I wasn’t thinking about a logo, but about a monogram. I spare you those ones, they were plain ugly. Then one day, during my high school, I drew one I thought it was pretty good. Years later I vectorialized it in Illustrator. Here it is:

Today I think that’s quite naive, and that’s an euphemism. For the most part I regret using it for so much time. You can also see that it’s blue: my favorite color is blue. I just wasn’t sure on what shade of blue I should use, but that’s it.

Problems? A lot:

1. It’s a “D” from my name, but that’s not very clear.
2. The concepts it expresses were mostly in my mind, but they didn’t match anything real about me: yes, it’s something blooming up there (like the coat of arms of Florence). Yes, it resembles a comet. And a sail. Too much.
3. It has small parts so it can’t be very small.
4. It isn’t enough bold to be used with a filler image.
5. It is quite within the “enso”, but not enough.
6. Aligning it with text is a big problem.

So, 2009. I decided to evolve it.

The evolution

So I decided to evolve it. At first I thought I could blend it with the infinity symbol, but it was too pretentious. Still, the task of building it was interesting since very small variations on the curvature of any of its parts was able to “break” the perception of it. I forgot: it was a D, an infinity symbol and in a “perceived” 3D.

It’s unfinished, it was a nice experiment, but it’s still ugly, if not uglier than its precursor. It’s cool playing with the infinity symbol, it’s cool trying pseudo-3D, but well. No. Rewind.

So I simply decided to give elegance and boldness to the first one. Still an evolution, I was trying to build something new with old pieces.

This was fine for me. It was elegant. It solved many problems of the first one. It was also technically “perfect”, built with just a two ellypses in different sizes and positions:

If you read up until now, you should notice that I “forgot” everything I was saying in the first paragraphs of this article. My friends were saying “uhhh nice nice”: I had to convince them it was good.

The months were passing. One evening of october I was talking with Gaetano Grizzanti, a guru for me in the brand design field (go check his company, Univisual and its wonderful and powerful logo). I showed the logo to him.

“It’s good …for a military organization.”

That was it.
No more words.
He changed topic.

I went to sleep with those words in my mind. The next morning I looked again at the logo and it was clear to me that I was ignoring my own ideas. I was stuck in some mental loophole. The logo was good for a Space Marine legion.

I took again in my hands the book about japanese calligraphy I had on the shelf. Then I immersed myself in all the books and websites about logo design, to “clean” my mind.

The process

Designing a logo for a person is both easier and harder than doing it for a company. First of all, I wrote down all the things I wanted my logo to be able to express. A long list of words about me, my profession, my style. Then I killed all the words that were too much “external”: I wanted a logo able to express me, not what I can do or how I appear on the surface. Then I killed all the words that were too common, too “everyone wants this”, too abstract.

Then I did a little bit of copywriting on the remaining words, there were just a few. I wrote them alone on a sheet of paper.

• simplicity
• meaning
• hybrid
• synthesis
• pragmatism

And I simply realized that what I was trying to express was just a variation of Intense Minimalism.

I took another sheet of paper and then for the next two weeks I took some time every evening to draw logo ideas and the next day to think about it. I showed some of them to my friends, got some feedback and started again the next day.

• Simplicity called strongly for “just the circle” but as I’ve stated before, you can’t make a logo from just a circle.
• Meaning was intrinsic in the logo concept by itself.
• Hybrid. An unity made by different parts.
• Synthesis told me to do something that in some ways should converge to an unity (the last synthesis possible).
• Pragmatism meant that it should be some sort of geometry. Or something handwritten (like the enso above).

This is the last of the sheets I filled.

The Intense Minimalism logo

1. Simple an geometric. Just three circles (three one of the “perfect numbers”).
2. The middle part isn’t just the overlapping part between the two external circles: it’s a perfect circle by itself. It expresses well how the whole is more than the sum of its parts.
3. Also, it’s like the additive property of the RGB space: blue + blue = white.
4. It expresses well the hybrid concept: a unity made by different parts.
5. The two external circles are of light blue and dark blue.
6. It’s a little 3D, since it could be viewed as a ring, slightly angled.

My favorite meaning is the second one.

The typography

As Gianfranco hinted me, I didn’t add anything about the logotype itself. I skipped that because in fact it’s the same logotype I’ve used for years on my italian blog. It’s born alongside my attraction to the Univers typeface, mostly in its condensed variations.

The “leaves” are something I took from my first logo but they are there hinting to something living, something that’s blooming, while in a discrete way.

The interesting part about it is that John Boardley of I Love Typography fame gave me an hand in december of 2008 to correct some kerning issues (i.e. “a+l” tighter, “ten” to be readjusted). It’s a small detail but helps in defining a better result overall, and it was a short but interesting conversation with him. He’s a great guy.

Logosheet

As I always do when I complete a logo design, I made what I call a logosheet, an editable PDF with all the important traits of the logo, the inverted form, some rules on its usage and a few more details. The PDF is editable in order to take from it the logo when you need it.