…what’s it all about?

Well, it’s my creator logo. Designed in conjunction with longtime collaborator Patrick Foster. Having a creator logo is something I’ve been thinking about for years. Two years, at least. Michael May blogged about me mentioning it back at SDCC ‘06.

So for anyone who’s curious, here’s the story of the logo’s evolution:

It all began with the same basic reasoning behind why I always buy new clothes for and dress nice at cons and why I wore the same hat to conventions for two years: The comic industry is filled with visual people, and to not make yourself visually noticeable is to miss out on a huge opportunity to be remembered. Just ask Grant Morrison.

As you’ve probably learned by now, I like projects and experiments. And that’s how my exploration of visual branding began. With an experiment. To be precise, I wore the same two hats (a battered fedora inherited from my father and one I found in a thrift store that looked almost exactly like it…so they were essentially the same hat) every day at every convention I attended for two years. Always pulled down over one eye. Here’s the hat in a still captured from the YouTube video of me pitching for Comic Book Idol in 2006:

And you know what? It worked. People who didn’t necessarily remember my name still recognized me instantly from convention to convention. I haven’t worn the hat in a couple years now, and a guy still recognized me as “the guy with the hat” at NYCC in May. Ultimately I retired the hat because Ed Brubaker has branded himself with a similar one:

Brubaker is much more well-known than I am and, while I want to be remembered, I don’t want to be remembered as copying someone else, which is how it could be perceived. No hard feelings, Ed. I just want to be visually distinct in my own manner, without being in the shadow of anyone else. But the hat definitely taught me how effective personal visual branding could be.

I folded that thinking into what I was already thinking about a creator logo. And I went looking for other examples. The only one I could really find was the gear motif that Warren Ellis uses for his various projects:

The hat taught me the logo should be simple and iconic, for ease of memory, and Warren Ellis taught me it should be versatile. So, after letting all this percolate for a couple years and finding further visual inspiration in NIN’s The Slip, on Andy Diggle’s MySpace and in a sake label discovered in Neo-Japanesque Graphics, the visual that I wanted finally came together in the logo you see here. This take on my initial is basically a variation of one of the most recognizable symbols in our culture–the copyright “©”. A symbol used to assign legal rights to ideas. Which is what I want to be know for.

Ideas.

So you see it here on my website. It’s my avatar (albeit with different color schemes) on ComicSpace, MySpace, and all the message boards I visit. There’s a version of it my signature when I sign books. It’s on my new business card:

I wore it on a C-Shirt Saturday at SDCC. And got “nice shirt” compliments on it from other creators who didn’t even realize it was my logo. So far I feel like it’s working.

Of course, a visual brand is more of a long game than a short one.