What's the story behind the observable logo?

Does anyone know what is the story behind the monocular O logo?

-drd

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I drew it on a piece of paper. The immediate inspiration was coding fonts that have a dotted zero, like M+ and Source Code Pro, but it also looked like Theta (𝚯), which I think lent a sort of mathy vibe. It was initially typeset as the O in Observable, like 𝝝bservable, which was goofy and we abandoned that idea pretty quickly. The first version that I designed had pretty bad proportions, like:

CleanShot 2021-07-29 at 19.17.44@2x

But Maya quickly resolved that and separated the logo from the wordmark. She also made the dot larger, which made it look way better - comparison in some favicons (old on left, new on right)

image

There’s not a ton of hidden meaning behind the thing. Just felt right at the time and looked cool.

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Maybe entertainingly we’ve left the older versions in places like GitHub for the local development OAuth flow:

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Hey Visnu :wave:, let me know if you’re ever in NYC :slight_smile:

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Helloooo will do! Think you’ll be there for a while? Also, pardon the thread hijacking @drio :sweat_smile:

Yes! Unless something drags me away, this is the spot for me. The city just seems right and I live a few blocks away from the best bagel place in Brooklyn. They also have weather here, which has been a fun experience.

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Hey, no worries! Thank you for sharing.