new logo (pali musi)

new logo (pali musi)

Don't be alarmed! I have changed my logo.

The old t^2 logo really didn't have any meaning or context:

I previously had the idea of naming my site something like "Tate talks" or similar, but my site has evolved into more than I originally expected!

You may not have noticed, but I actually had different logos for different scales of image:

I've been meaning to update it for a while, but inspiration for a new logo has really come slowly.

Here's one that I almost used, but it's actually really ugly if you look at it:

I'm not sure what I was thinking here. 

Logos are funny things: they need to be clean and simple, but information-dense. They should communicate a lot of information with a few simple, recognizable shapes and lines.

On a side note, I'm a huge nerd and I love constructed languages (aka, conlangs). You may have heard of Klingon from Star Trek or various dialects of Elvish from Lord of the Rings. Constructed languages are languages that were entirely made up and designed by people (unlike natural languages like English, Spanish, or Chinese which essentially evolved by accident). In the cases of Klingon and Elvish, they were made up to be part of a fantasy world and tell a story.

Other people make up languages as part of their life mission to make the world a better place. Examples of this would include Esperanto, Interlingua which were designed to help people in western culture communicate more easily.

I plan to write an entire post about conlangs, but here I'll simply share that my favorite types of conlangs are made simply for their own sake. These are often called artistic languages (or artlangs). Simply put, different languages are beautiful for different reasons: lots of people think French sounds romantic while others love German vocabulary because they think it's very precise. Even though this is not objectively true, people perceive it to be true. So why not design a new language with the sound of French but the precision of German to see what it would be like? This is the idea behind artlangs.

toki pona

My favorite artlang, by far, is toki pona (no capitalization in its name). It's based upon the philosophical idea that simplicity is good. There are many reasons to love toki pona (I'll cover a lot of them in a later post)!

toki pona can be written using a logographic script, similar to how hieroglyphics work. The symbols used to represent words are simple, but packed with information. That sounds like perfect logo material to me!

For my logo, I chose the phrase "pali musi" which loosely translates to "fun work" or "a fun project" which I think encompasses the purpose of this website quite well!

Here it is:

pali musi: pali = work or project; musi = fun and games

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