When I created the earth graphic in 1999, I soon realized it would become the logo or symbol of my new domain, unsaturated.com. You can see the prominent location it commanded on my site in the very early days. It later inspired me to create a 3D version, which I then animated to create a sort of website promotion / movie trailer. Now, 10 years after the original was created, I’ve finally taken the time to create a scalable vector graphic (SVG) version.
My salad days of graphical dabbling focused on raster graphics. I didn’t know anything else because that’s what PaintShop Pro emphasized. Transparent GIF images were in vogue, mainly to show off gaudy background images. I didn’t know any better when I designed the first website for the Collier County Sheriff’s Office. You can see how enthusiastically I used background images. Every human factors engineer should look back at his earlier work and learn from that experience. Smack your forehead, shake your head, but always learn.
The web evolved very quickly and with it graphics, how they’re created, and how they’re stored. SVG is one of those formats, along with the open source tools used to create them. For my update, I used Inkscape. In total, the process is very similar to creating the raster version but with SVG it’s easier to dissect the process into a series of unions, intersections, or difference procedures.
I started with the basic ellipse shape and then added objects which would be used to parse the globe into its constituent pieces.
Object intersections and differences yield the final four parts of the globe. These steps were very easy and took only a few minutes. I spent a few minutes on alignment since the process of adding, removing, copying/pasting is rather disruptive.
The green hemisphere of the globe took a bit more work. I’m still learning various techniques to ensure nodes intersect properly. Nodes are the points that define a shape. Paths, which are defined with a sequence of nodes, are harder to manipulate. Like so many problems there are often multiple ways to get the same result. Finally, adding a dash of color finishes the job.
What Works?
Like a movie critic watching a remake, I’m going to focus not on the content, but the presentation and delivery. Essentially, it’s the same graphic. Nothing new was added, nothing taken away. The difference is in the detail. I focused on precision. Whereas the first iteration of the earth allowed the offset hemisphere to touch the globe, in this version I kept them separate. The white space deserved equal clarity and now it’s got it. The intention was never to make a true, three-dimensional logo. It was to represent, in my original words “a clue that what’s outside the globe doesn’t represent everything that’s inside the globe.”
What Failed?
When faced with the chance to update a system or revamp an old design, software developers frequently encounter the second-system effect. In short, it’s the tendency to bloat a system with all the goodies and features that didn’t make it into the first deliverable. My goal in doing this was to avoid such a failure. I believe I succeeded. So, what exactly failed? Aren’t there always deficiencies in a design? Perhaps I’ve reached a stage where this logo is precisely what I want and nothing more. Adding ornate features are unnecessary but taking away anything fundamentally changes it and, in my opinion, would not succeed.
Write a Comment