We were nearing Christmas break, and the website had just been announced. In classic high school style, I was sitting at my desk pretending to work. For once, though, I really didn’t have anything to do… mostly. Certainly, I didn’t have a busy schedule.
There was news of a new website in the works, and by news I mean I was doing my usual gig of sitting and listening in on someone else’s conversation. It’s not like I can help it, this particular unnamed group of website creators is always having some very unsubtle conversation about one thing or another, but this time it was something different.
I’m not quite sure how it happened, but somehow I was roped into the creation. It sounded interesting enough and what else was I going to do? They set me to the task of creating a logo for the platform, and right away I knew what I wanted to do. The phrase bounced, maybe sloshed around my skull: Brain soup. Microwave for fifteen minutes and you’ve got yourself a treat.
Okay, first of all, who microwaves anything for FIFTEEN MINUTES? Regardless, I had latched on to the thought and was ready to run. The first step was brainstorming. I dumped out all my brain juices onto the screen and presented it to the team.
We ruled out the brain because it would be difficult to see on a small scale. We wanted to be able to use this logo as a favicon, which is the tiny icon that sometimes appears on a website tab to identify it. Favicons are only 16×16 pixels, so I knew I would have to use bold and identifiable shapes.
We decided that the logo looked better with the spoon dipped into the bowl, but we wanted to use the swirl from the first design, so I combined them.
I changed the swirl into rings so that I could implement a bit more color and make the design a bit simpler. As it turns out, that was a good choice, because after I finished the design, the creators wanted to animate it.
Moving the elements frame by frame, I made the rings bob up and down, rippling out towards the outer rings. I also added a bit of steam (or as somebody called them, SMELL LINES) and I was finished with the animation!
The Learning Repository 