Thumbnail

How I created my logo

The idea behind my logo came to me after struggling with the infinitely fragmented knowledge typically featured in schools and universities. Centralization and connections within each person's knowledge base has since become one of my most important missions, my main compass.

Not surprisingly, some people also do get it, and have come to the same conclusion, albeit through very different paths. For example, Dr. Alan Watkins, in his book Coherence, argues that the challenge for the 21st century will lie on reintegrating all of our overspecialized, island fields: otherwise we will, as some science fiction has already stated, end up knowing everything about nothing.

The marketplace seems to be the culprit, at least in many regards. The more specialized you are, the more sought after you will be; generic problems can be solved by most, after all. However, this can backfire when the complexity of the managed system starts to spread along different subjects. That might be one of the major causes of why there's usually a critical mass or size for many companies before they crumble under their own complexity weight, giving rise to usually newer, leaner, less complicated competitors. The cycle of corporate life repeats, and humans, who have a hard time learning from their ancestors' mistakes, will have an even harder time learning from their less relatable corporate ancestors' mistakes.

This capitalist problem creeps into universities and schools as well, but maybe in a different shape. The more isolated departments are from each other, the easier it is to justify their own existence and budgets, the easier it is to make it hard for others to get anything done within your topic.

It's easy to spot why people find it hard and cumbersome to keep everything connected. By laying it out in a graph, we can see that different topics, with usually sequential connections, form a polygon. Connections between all the vertices of the polygon seem to grow very quickly as we grow the number of sides.

Connected Pentagon of Different Subjects
An example of different subjects connected in a polygonal network. I do get that sometimes, if not often, connecting subjects can be difficult: how is math connected to English? But the toughest connections can yield the highest rewards, like machine learning with natural languages — see LSTMs and GPT-3, for instance.

That's because they grow quadratically — \(O(n^2)\) —, not linearly — \(O(n)\). In other words, the number of connections, specially the inner ones, as we shall see, grows with the square of the number of sides, which is jargon for "boy, do they grow fast". But how exactly do they grow, you might ask?

It turns out that connecting dots is analogous to making combinations of pairs. That means order doesn't matter, so we can use the somewhat basic combinatorics formula we learn in high school — \(n\) stands for number of vertices or sides of the polygon —:

\begin{align} &\# \ of \ Connections(n) = C_{n, 2} = \frac{n!}{2!(n - 2)!} = \frac{n(n - 1)}{2}, \ for \ n \geq 3 \\ &\# \ of \ Internal \ Connections(n) = C_{n,2} - n = \frac{n(n - 1)}{2} - n = \frac{n(n - 3)}{2}, \ for \ n \geq 3 \end{align}

Notice from above that the number of internal connections also still grows quadratically, even though the perimeter grows linearly. This is yet another justification for taking a strong stance towards connecting knowledge: connecting knowledge grows more quickly than gathering/creating knowledge sequentially, although creating the nodes is still necessary, of course.

But why exactly did I choose a hexagon shape for my logo? Is it just because it looks symmetrical and kind of nice?

Nope. I chose it because it stands in the transition between where perimeter connections are more numerous and where inner connections start ruling the land. It's the first polygon where the number of internal connections are higher than their outer counterparts, as you can see from the table below:

# of Sides on the Polygon # of Total Connections # of Internal Connections
3 3 0
4 6 2
5 10 5
6 15 9
7 21 14
8 28 20
9 36 27
10 45 35
… … …

The overall shape of the design is, then, settled, so what now?

Here are some extra decisions I had to take in order to get to the end result:

So what do you think about my logo and its reasoning? Great? An amazing example of overengineering? Maybe you think the equivalence between knowledge and graphs is a false or insufficient one?

Personally, working on the connections throughout the past few years has been both a source of relief and pleasure. Not only do I have access to basically every piece of knowledge I possess, no matter in which subject I am, but the connections themselves seem to generate knowledge, not only the nodes.

Originally, I wanted to create some sort of surrealist logo based on an iconic depiction of Diogenes of Sinope, an ancient Greek Cynic philosopher I admire, probably my favorite philosopher in terms of values. However, that's still a bit considerably above my paygrade, I don't have the know-how. I've even tried to contact Murugandi for help, since he has a lot of expertise on the topic, but I just couldn't fully articulate what I wanted.

Additionally, if you're interested in learning more about design and its craftsmanship, I highly recommend:


Sorry for the delaying this post so much, it took me 10+ months to start working on it, after finishing my design. I waited to see if I would change my mind with respect to the design, but, so far, I still like it and stand by its logic and ideas.