THE STORY

When I was working at UMass Medical School, the Ophthalmology Department was looking to update the department logo. Somehow I was having design fever again and wanted to dust off my design skill. I have been involved in my lab’s website and knew many people in the department, so why not.

DESIGN IDEA / THINKING

ICON / BASE DESIGN

Our lab (and many other research-side teams) has several genetic projects. I was looking into how to merge / mix / assimilate something that is perceived as genetic with something that is like an eye.

GENETIC

Few ideas I had about some visuals that are common in genetic studies are:

• Blots (like western blot, Southern blot, northwestern blot, etc.)
• Marking of mutations in a chromosome
• Exon splices

EYE

I guess there is not much variety or there is no need for an out-of-the-box idea for an eye

• A full eye, anterior view
• Sagittal view of eyeball
• The iris

COLOR

I had known about Pantone way before, but Pantone color of the year somehow became a big news recently and it felt the color had become a trendy influencers topic. The color of the 2021 was somehow a two-colors instead of one.

There some info on the meaning of each color, and I thought they could fit to the department vision or current situation. So I decided to just use these 2 colors.

CREATION

I came up with three different styles.

COMMON AMONG 3

I couldn’t come up with three totally different ideas; so, these 3 have very similar workflows:

• I used Adobe Illustrator circular pattern

  • First, I created a custom brush, based on some pattern of genetic icons I came up earlier.
  • Then, I created a circle line vector.
  • Finally, I applied the line using custom brush instead of a solid line.

• The 2021 text is the same on all three

  • The 20 uses the gray color to mark both the unchanging part of the year (the two thousand), as well as that we just passed the year 2020, and the 2020 being marked gray can mean as the off.
  • The 21 uses the yellow (Illuminating) to mark the new year, and maybe the new meaning (we were just starting to get used to COVID19 life anyway).

ART 1

The eye part is based on the iris, while the line is more like line-chart but I can say it is like exon splices too. There is a flare on the inner lower left, just mimicking how eye icon has flare to show the transparency.

ART 2

The eye base is technically a full front eye. The original logo of UMass Eye Center used this style of eye as well (and many other eye clinics). The line part was inspired a bit from the Southern blot, but technically it was created using R as a stacked bar graph.

ART 3

The idea is similar to Art 1, but there is more flair added. The line part was like chromosome even though it was created with random ellipse tools.

SELECTION

In the end I selected Art 2 since I like the stacked bar graph line. Art 1 is good too, but it doesn’t really show like an eye. Art 3 is just too busy.

IN THE END

The deparment had a form to submit the designs. I even created a report form to explain my thinking:

But the decision makers in the end decided not to change their old logo at all 😓.