Thanks to the Peanut Gallery for all the great input on new logos. It’s funny what an evolutionary process design can be. My initial inspiration was to try to emulate the style of WPA posters and graphics in keeping with the “Great Depression 2.0″ zeitgeist, but what I ended up with isn’t especially New Deal-ish at all. In fact, it’s downright ominous.
I’ll elaborate. My intent was to find some image from the 1930s that was used iconically in that late Art Deco – Futurist style, and so I tried things like the Atlas sculpture from Rockefeller Center, a zeppelin, a streamlined railroad engine, some abstract geometric shapes, and even the Trilon and Perisphere from the 1939 World’s Fair. Though the gang liked the zeppelin (of the designs I shared with them), ultimately I felt it was impossible not to associate the generic image of a zeppelin with the Hindenburg. So, thinking about other images of the period, I hit upon radio towers. In my mind, the thing I was trying to duplicate was the classic RKO radio tower movie logo. But, despite several sessions of serious Googling, I couldn’t come up with anything that had the right look and feel.
Then I came across this picture. It’s not a radio tower per se, it’s Nicola Tesla’s laboratory, called Wardenclyffe Tower, on Long Island. Tesla built this tower in 1901 to experiment with wireless telegraphy, at roughly the same time that Gugliemo Marconi was doing similar work. Tesla, who is widely revered among scientists and engineers today for his ideas, was the Unluckiest Man In The World during his work life, as he consistently lost out to other innovators like Marconi, Edison, and others who were more fortunate in finding commercial backing for work that was often near-identical to his. Tesla’s wireless technology lost out to Marconi’s once and for all when a young David Sarnoff, working as a radio operator for the Marconi company, made headlines relaying the disaster signal and casuality list from the sinking of the Titanic, cementing the notion of Marconi as the “inventor of wireless” in the mind of the public. Wardenclyffe was abandoned and the tower itself destroyed in 1917.
What I loved about this picture is the sort of “mad scientist” look with the lightning bolts extending from the ominous-looking tower, and the antique quality of the photo, which also captures a feeling of German Expressionist Cinema (think “Metropolis”). It’s a far cry from the socialist abstraction of WPA art, but it really appealed to me. A little Photoshopping to make the graininess stand out even more and to highlight the electrical field, along with a suitably moody blue tint, and voila! The font is Mouse Deco, which was spot-on for a 1930′s look, but I might need to find something a little more intense to replace it.
The WordPress design is called “Visionary”, by Justin Tadlock. It’s a “magazine” theme, which means that it breaks with the traditional chronologically-ordered diary style of blogging and presents a “feature” article and several smaller articles, which can be organized by category, much as a magazine is broken up into a cover story and sections. I’ve been wanting to do this with BKO for a long time, since my posts aren’t temporally related for the most part. Once I figure out how to organize things, you can expect the front page to be organized entirely by category, with the newest post in each category on the front page. The visual look of the design is simple and clean, which I always prefer to the over-decorated style of so many blogs. It’s hard to find a pre-cooked WordPress theme that isn’t like technicolor vomit on your screen, so I really appreciated this particular design, which I found via this newsblog.
I also updated my WordPress backend to the latest version, 2.7, which adds a ton of admin functionality. I was also surprised and delighted to see that they included a tool for importing Movable Type blog entries at long last, so once I work out all the design bits, my next project will be importing the BKO archives into my WordPress database. It may finally be possible to have all of my blog entries dating back to 2000 online and accessible through a single database. I am very pumped about that.
So, in the end, I didn’t get quite what I set out to have, but I am pretty pleased with what I ended up with, and look forward to making BKO even better in 2009.
