Unclassified Art – Podcast Logo Design

When you’re creating a non-text logo, there are so many directions you can take it’s almost like sitting at the beach and watching infinity fly by. Do you scan history for a well known symbol? Do you construct something totally original? It depends on the nature of the project. These drawings below have been designed with a podcast in mind. At first, I imagined a face. Androgynous, eyes closed in rapture, listening to the sound of music. Or in this case, gaming, the subject matter of the podcast.

Then I thought to include ‘piercings’, but not in the typical sense. Instead of having a decorative purpose where fashion is the aim, these piercings would function more like powerpoints or jacks. Earphone plugs would feed into them via direct interface, blurrying the division between organic and digital.

Of course, I needed to represent the crossover in a more noticeable way. So I allowed the electricity to pop up like veins, branching out from the middle ear towards the eyes. The final touch was manipulating consoles, keyboards and phones into pixellated images, and arranging them around the face in an attractive manner. The message I’m attempting to convey is this individual — who is literally plugged into a gaming podcast — is thorougly enjoying what they’re listening to. The pixel art mouse hints at the podcast’s name. Finally, I added a quick banner at the bottom with ‘Carpe Ludum’, Latin for “seize the game”. Hopefully this idea can be used in future endeavours. I could really see it working in a post-apocalyptic piece of fiction where everybody is permaplugged into an omniscient ‘brainbook’ or global neural web. A bit like Trance in Wadjet Eye Games’ Technobabylon.