Is it a creator’s curse to never be satisfied with a final design, or is it just me? Ever since I made my logo I’ve done small revisions here and there. It started as small fixes in the imperfections, then simplifying it so that when I compressed the size it wasn’t muddy on my lasered cardstock. I was happy with what I had for a while, but still wanted to do something about it eventually.
Then in November I was tricked by the beautiful new iPad design and I bought one with a new Apple Pencil as a companion to the Glowforge. I figured that if I was going to be more serious about making the Glowforge my primary source of income, then I needed to begin hand-drawing my own designs (at least on something bigger than my Galaxy note9) in a more organic way than with the previous tools I had been using. So I began with small things such as pretty cool earrings (I’ll post about those eventually 
), and then I decided I was going to take on my logo head on.
Originally I had just used a random image on a google search for my fingerprint design, and a quick signature on a sticky note uploaded through my scanner and threw them together in Photoshop. The problem was that the fingerprint was far too detailed, and as I mentioned, got a little hard to decipher when made smaller. My signature wasn’t satisfying to me, especially because it didn’t really represent my signature, but something that I kind of did in a hurry out of excitement, I mean, you can’t even tell that there is an “a” there!
Okay, so I knew what I wanted to fix; which of course, was my entire logo! I began hand drawing a fingerprint, which if that sounds like fun, it’s because it sort of was. I stared at my own thumb for inspiration and just started drawing lines until I had a basic outline of my thumb. Then I filled it in with detail lines, but I didn’t want it too cluttered, otherwise I’d be back at square one. So I came up with a rough draft of what I wanted (which at the time was another final design 
) and used the old signature, because really, I didn’t mind at the time. That’s when I began noticing my signature at work was entirely different than the one I was selling to people, so once again I went back to the drawing board (literally!). I stayed up the night of New Year’s Eve and decided that the simplified version of my fingerprint actually should be a bit more detailed and worked on that for hours, the following day I analyzed my signature and decided which route I wanted to go in. I have three distinct signatures, and had to decide what elements I wanted of each one. I mean, I don’t want to give my literal signature out, but a hero signature was what I needed, so that’s what I spent hours also working on. Is it perfect? No, but I’m not a perfect person, and I’m definitely not going to be selling to perfect people, so who cares anyway 
Guess this is kind of long post for me wanting to share my creative process, but I just thought if someone could understand, it was probably the lot of you. Here’s an image of the evolution of the logo, which, as my wife said, “this is it…until you decide to change it again” (she knows me too well 
)
I’ll still end up using the middle fingerprint for smaller stuff, but I’ll be updating it with the new signature, and maybe tweaking the thickness of the lines and, and, and…see there I go again!
Still, thanks for the creative influences and the support. This community never ceases to make me feel good about what I’m doing!
