A personal logo
For a long time, I've been kicking around questions about personal logos: what are they for? do I need one? what should mine be? I've never really found an answer to any of those questions, other than finding that I want to have one to put on my website. Something simple, ideally, and maybe not even unique, but one that I feel evokes my self and interests.
About a month ago, the idea for the current design came to me. I was thinking a lot about circles, particularly because I was thinking that they're a very natural shape in the universe, since almost everything in astronomy ends up being quasi-spherical. Sketching circles and various designs overlaid, I eventually just drew on thick horizontal line over the center, and it felt like something clicked. The result touches on most of the aspects of myself that I want to represent in a logo, while remaining a simple geometric construction.
One of the ways that I feel connected to the logo is my interest in astronomy. A circle with a horizontal line across it is reminiscent of a ringed planet like Saturn, a black hole with its accretion disk, or a galaxy with its spherical halo and gas disk. And since half of my research is astrophysical and cosmological in nature, it feels like the logo connects with my work in a real way.
The logo is also very similar to the Greek letter theta (θ). Theta is commonly used in machine learning to represent the parameters of a model; e.g. the weights and biases that make up a neural network. In some sense, theta is the network. Given that the other half of my research is based in machine learning, I felt like this icon connected to my specific research in a real way.
In the past while thinking about icons, I have often tried to massage my initials into simpler shapes. My last shot at this was a circle with a vertical line along the diameter and a horizontal line to its right marking the orthogonal radius. The left semicircle was meant to represent a C; the vertical diameter, horizontal radius, and right semicircle together reflected an H whose right vertical was bent over until its ends connected to the left. While in the end I didn't like that image very much, the idea of taking the left and right vertical lines of an H and bending them into a circle was something I liked, and that idea is manifest here as well! So not only does this image reflect my research, it also depicts my name.
Once I realized that connection, I was sold. Some fiddling with brushes in Procreate and I had the final version presented here. And for smaller and digital uses, I also made a simple, clean version in Figma, seen at the top of the nav and in the favicon of this site. I tweaked the website design a bit to feature this new icon, and I'm super happy with how everything turned out.