My new identity system
Behind the scenes
The brief
For this new website in 2024, I wanted to come with a funky visual identity system that I can also use on social media, showreels, business cards, merch/swag etc.
It was important to come up with something simple and bold that represented the creative AND the technical elements of my work. It had to be something that will work nice and bold in 2D, but still have a 3D element so as to be native to spatial computing.
I also wanted something flexible that can adapt to stay dynamic and fresh for as long as possible. They say these days that good web UX is done “mobile-first”, but I’ve been thinking that we need to start paying more attention to the current paradigm shift towards immersive content. With spatial computing the design rulebook is getting torn up once again.
1:1 Aspect ratio
We’ve seen a LOT of aspect ratios over the years. That can make good responsive design seem impossible at times.
Having to create content for 6:13 portrait mobile screens that also looks good when shown on a landscape 16:9 TV can be very challenging.
I create a lot of portrait (phone), square (VR first person view) and landscape (phone, desktop) content. Knowing this up front made me want to try a new format of blog style site. I need a site that can be updated very quickly, with only 1 aspect ratio to worry about. Ideally this content can also be reused for various social platforms.
I figured in that end that the square 1:1 aspect ratio is the least bad solution!
Squares and Circles
I hope that for moving fast with putting out new content, I’m not as burdened by making multiple versions of content. Hopefully nothing should ever look terrible (IMO!) But it should at least fill most of whatever screen the viewer is looking at. Time will tell if this was a good move!
The Squircle
I hit upon the idea of being a ‘square’ for some of the more geeky jobs that I do, and being a circle to represent the more creative side of my job, and I wanted to explore visual ways of portraying that. What came to mind was a super interesting shape called a ‘Squircle’ (half Square, half Circle) that a man called Hamish showed me few years ago. Squircles look like a square from one angle, then a circle from another angle, but I couldn’t find much online.
3 for 1 deal
Eventually I found something else online on an obscure maths forum, have you seen this shape before?
It’s a circle from the top view
It’s a square from the front
It’s a triangle from the side
I’m not sure if it has a name, If you look at it in 3D it looks quite like a wedge or like the end of a flat edge screwdriver. This was everything I was looking for, and with a bonus triangle which I assigned to the represent the business side of my job and I was set…
Square = Nerd Tom
Circle = Artist Tom
Triangle = Business Tom
