I always believed in visual branding. I remember as a 10-year-old, trying to come up with a sweeping Hollywoodesque signature to separate me from those classmates who just wrote out their names in shaky cursive (imagine how I beamed with pride when Olga Kalyniak, a teller at the TD Bank in St. Laurent, explaimed "Well, will you look at that!" when I signed the signature card to my junior account). Years later, when Garner Bornstein and I came up were bouncing around logo concepts for Airborne Entertainment, one of my main criteria was: "Would a kid want to wear it on a t-shirt?"
That said, I recently overhauled the look of this blog, and had the very talented Scott Brooks adapt an original idea of mine into the logo that not only adorns this blog, but hopefully will serve to visually define the word "Surprise."
Let's dissect it, shall we?
In the center is your standard exclamation point, vise-gripped by two gaping circles. While they give off strong vibes of staring down the barrel of a shotgun (quite the fitting metaphor for "Pow! Right Between The Eyes," wouldn't you say?), they are actually meant to symbolize the eyes themselves.
Put together, the circles and punctuation mark form the semblance of a face, wide-eyed and open-mouthed...the epitome of what we look like when we're surprised.
Tom Peters seems to have first dibs on the exclamation mark as a symbol, and has used to to connote "Wow!" I've taken it a bit further, if I must say so rather immodestly. As I explained in my second-ever post, Surprise trumps Wow.
And, if I may be so bold in describing my logo, the addition of the two circles takes the common exclamation mark...and gives it the balls it needs to truly Surprise.
Pow! Right Between The...well, you know where.