Whenever I need some logo or other design done, I turn to Cody Woodard, also known as "d8uv", who then often gives me back something within an hour. Since I've asked him for so much stuff, I thought I ought to pay him homage in the form of a portfolio, showing just how damn snazzy his designs are.
Designs: Ghyll · Jottage · Mimulus · Phenny · Pluvo · Project Symbols · RSS 1.1 · Shakespeare Chronology · The Flog · What Planet is This? · Others
Morbus Iff hosted a collaborative online lexicon game called Ghyll, and Cody and I were players. Someone asked Cody to make the Ghyll logo, and this was the first thing that he came up with. The perspective and the ethereal green tint contributed a lot to the actual game itself, I think, to the extent that aesthetics can inform content.
Cody later redesigned the logo to a much higher quality for a t-shirt, that didn't actually go into production; the redesign is the one above, and the original design is below. The redesign corrected several mistakes that he'd been quite vexed about since making the original, but which most people wouldn't even notice (the most obvious is the spike on the "y").
Jottage was a wiki with an IRC interface. The pen for the "j" is probably my favourite bit of Cody design, and it balances exquisitely with the chosen font, so the point where they look like they were made together.
One funny thing about this logo is that since it uses PNG transparency, when Cody sent me the image initially I saw it on a black background and hence it looked like just a big black blob. I tried it in another program, which unbeknownst to me also used a black background, and again it looked like a silly black blob. So I complain-chuckled to Cody about his having sent me a USELESS BLACK BLOB, and he told me to try once more... Promoting profuse apologies from me.
Cody comments: "Thanks, Google Image Search, for finding me a cool .gif to pilfer a pen from! Of course, I redrew it using Vectors to make it better. GIS is a godsend for people (like me) who can't draw."
![[Mimulus]](mimulus.png)
Mimulus is an XHTML editor extension for Firefox. For this logo, I think that the design specification I came up with was simply "make it blue, and make it an 'm'". The cool background globe glazing was Cody's idea, and the font he used was one of the new Microsoft C* fonts.
Cody comments: "This is probably my most web2.0 design. Also, I'd glad sbp kept the original size because he loves to shrink everything down to postage stamp size."
He also made a series of smaller icons for other facilities within the editor, for example representing whether it's turned on or off. Mmmm...
Phenny is an IRC bot often referred to as having a very flouncy and fluid female personality, so I wanted the logo to be pink and in a chancery style font. I forget which font Cody ended up using, but I remember he had to repair it with a rolling filter. The results are very nice, anyway, and work especially well in context.
Cody comments: "You could say that the flowery-yet-slighly-alien look combined with the retro pink really fits the design, but truthfully: 1) I pilfered a font from somewhere but it was too small, 2) I made it big, Biggening things makes things look terrible, 3) I triaged the hell out of it, but it still ended up looking horrible, 4) I sent it to sbp being too tired to futz with it more, 5) He shrunk it down to the font's original size, making steps 2-4 not needed. ¶ I'm glad I've really never seen this logo."
The specification for this was similar to my other specifications, in that I simply asked for a big, red 'p', and that's what I got. But I also asked for something futuristic (Pluvo is a high level programming language), and yet extremely distinctive. I can barely utter the extent to which I think this design achieves that... it's just wonderful. The geometrical play of the thing really hits the nail on the head.
Cody comments: "I don't know how I came up with this, but I really love it. Geometrics are fun. I also made a really sweet web design to go with this, but sbp changed it a lot so what's live only has like 10% d8uvblood in it." Furthermore: "The Pluvo logo, thanks to the geometries, has some fake perspective going on. In the website, that was used to draw attention away from the logo, and towards the intro paragraph."
These were for a page that I did outlining some of my projects. I noticed that the projects could be divided up into roughly five categories, and I wanted to make an interface that reflected that, and even let you choose which projects to display based on the categories. So I decided it'd be nice to have icons for the categories in the interface, and this is what Cody and I came up with; I'm pretty sure that they were 90% of Cody's design, or more.
The all is a glob star, the code is an SGML close tag, the doc is a magnifying glass reading a line, the pub is a page of text, and the svc is a service bell.
Cody comments: "I love working either absurdly big, or absurdly tiny. The original icon for 'all' was 8 arrows nearly filling all of the space and looking cool, but sbp went with an asterisk. I'm not complaining though. Also, sbp killed most of the saturation here, which looked better in the end."
RSS 1.1 was a bugfix of RSS 1.0. Not only did Cody help with the format, but also came up with the logo. He doesn't like this design all that much, but I think it's more than passable. Since the Creative Commons logos suck and aren't really in keeping with the RSS 1.1 style, he also made a Creative Commons logo for us too.
Cody comments: "I seriously don't know why people like this. It's ass ugly, and probably the reason why RSS 1.1 never went anywhere. At least the cc logo is cool."
I'd had the idea of displaying the possible dates in which the plays of Shakepeare were written in this way for some time, but when I wrote my page on Shakpesearean Chronology I thought it was a good time to actually realise it. Since this is what Cody's good at, I asked him; and he delivered what you see above.
Cody comments: "Gimp + OpenOffice.org. And it shows. If I had time, I'd redraw this entirely in the Gimp to get rid of the ugly OpenOffice feel."
This was for Cody's own weblog, The Flog, but I really like its shimmering translucent quality, so I'm including it here as indicative of what he does. This is the most recent of his work on this page, and also possibly the best in respect to the degree to which it's polished.
Cody comments: "Duplicate Layer. Gaussian blur to 20 or so. Set opacity to 50% or so, set behind original. This is one of my favorite techniques, but it's starting to get popular so I gotta find out something else to overuse." Furthermore: "The Flog logo is probably the simplest, and took like 15 minutes to do. It uses a font I've overused (Calibri) and a technique I've overused. It looks cool with a hint of dorkiness in the background, which is basically The Flog in a nutshell."
One of my weblogs, as you can see from the information embedded in the title. This was actually a joint work: Cody's original had the planet in the middle, but I turned it into the dots for the i's. It really fits with the sleek but calm feel of the weblog itself.
He also made a logo that I asked for as a kind of page button for my Azimuth weblog software. The main requirement was that it be somehow related to the concept of an azimuth, and that it fit in with the current weblog style. He achieved both of these aims beautifully.
One of the most interesting things about this logo is that the typeface is Arial, not Helvetica. It looks like Helvetica, and Javier Candeira and I were rather confused as to what was going on, so Cody showed us a series of blowups of the logo, which made it clear that the Helveticality was due to the way that the image was reduced from its production size.
Cody comments: "I remember making something like a newspaper masthead. sbp took out everything but the font. It fits better with the site, somehow. And that little azimuth logo is neat. Everyone skips Arial for some reason."
These are things which I didn't ask Cody to design for some project, but are stuff he thought might work in this portfolio anyway. The more the merrier!
Cody comments: "My logo + web2.0. I love my logo, because it's distinctive, simple, cool, and has 'd8' all in it. And I love web2.0, because I'm required by law to."
This was one that I asked him to do. Res ipsa loquitur.
Cody comments: "I remember the original size of this was like 6000x2100. Didn't I mention I like to work big?"
Cody comments: "I love this logo, even though I have no idea why I made it."
Cody comments: "I think that week I tried crack."
Cody comments: "Was going to be in zap, but I cut it for some reason. Wanna know why zap nodes take forever to make? Because I do stupid things like make a fully-compliant UPC number, hand generate a barcode for it, and then, well put it on a zebra."
Cody sums it up: "I know Sean pointed out that most of these are done within the hour, but I would really like to emphasise that. The reason I'm not a professional designer is because I am way too fast. Most designers spend days over their creations obsessing about every detail. I spend at most 2 hours on all of these designs (except for zap). In zap, I ususally do the designer sort of obessing over every detail, but the results turn out usually worse than when I'm speed designing. Which is weird."