I scored 19 on my Color Test, which isn’t perfect but hey, it’s not so bad. Actually it’s great! I had always thought I was color blind because I took a test at the doctor once where I was supposed to say which was the letter L was pointing, and I didn’t see the letter, it just looked like a magic eye. Turns out I’m just no good at magic eyes!

For my Color Composition, my first thought was to draw inspiration from abstract geometric artists like Piet Mondrian and Kazmir Malevich, because I love the way that these very minimal compositions use color, like this. It’s interesting to think about what kind of approach these artists might have taken if they had computers at their disposal, let alone tools like processing. Maybe they would have created a system that automatically generates a random composition according to a few sets of rules. Maybe they would have animated their paintings (there are some great examples of this). But after getting bogged down in the math of pixel coordinates and making something that I was not so pleased with, I decided to put this idea aside for now.

I used Processing to create an animated geometric composition that changes one aspect of its color depending on the position of your mouse. There are three variations:

HUE – The circles are all monochrome colors within a range of 30 on the 360 scale. The range changes depending on the mouseX position. If you click the mouse then the hue of the inner ‘ring’ is offset by 30. So one click gives you analogous colors vs the outer ring. Four clicks gets you 2/3 of a triad. Six gets you in a complementary range and so forth. Meanwhile, the mouseY position controls the brightness of the background, which is a desaturated yellow at its brightest (attempting to emulate the color of a canvas), and nearly black at its darkest. The hues feels very different depending on the brightness of the background.

SATURATION – in this version, mouseX controls the saturation instead of the hue. I stuck with a fixed brightness in the background to really see the difference, but mouseY instead impacts the saturation of the background. Clicking changes the inner ring’s color range.

BRIGHTNESS – Now, mouseX controls the inner ring’s color range. When the colors are very dark, you realize that the background was not as black as it seemed, and can really see the difference between the saturated background (mouseY towards the bottom) vs the desaturated (mouseY towards the top).

In some circles, the Peavey logo has a bit of an uncouth reputation (like the brand itself, it is controversial), but I think their logo is perfect for what it represents.

Peavey is best known for making cheap but durable rock amplifiers with buzzsaw overdrive. Their logo is jagged, it screams “rock ‘n roll” (I think there’s even a subconscious R n R in here, and I love how the A and V play off each other). On the one hand, it looks like it was chiseled from a rock. On the other, you can almost feel the electric energy. Peavey was founded in Mississippi in 1964 by Hartley Peavey, an aspiring rock musician. He wanted an electric guitar but his dad wouldn’t let him, so he built his own. The logo first appeared as a doodle in Peavey’s grade school notebook. When I see this logo, I think of when I was in grade school and just wanted to rock but my parents wouldn’t let me etc.

In the early 1990s, Peavey changed their logo to appease Eddie Van Halen. They made an amp for him, the 5150, but he wouldn’t stand for the original “lightning” logo, said it didn’t fit his style and he didn’t want it on his Peavey amp. Meanwhile, he was playing a guitar that looked like this..

…but whatever.

So to appease EVH, Peavey changed their logo to the Delta logo in the early 90s. The letter A and V still play off each other, but the A is a triangle (delta) shape, perhaps a reference to “change” as in changing their logo, or “delta” like the company’s origins in the MIssissippi Delta.

In the early 2000s, they switched back to the original Peavey logo, confined to an oval.

I definitely like the original logo better. But some preferred the Delta logo. Others dislike both of them. It’s controversial. I know this from researching the Peavey logo controversy online where I found that the “Talk Bass Forum” recently held an unofficial Peavey Logo Redesign Contest. In my opinion none of them come close to the original Peavey logo.

In an era when anybody can access a world of readymade typefaces and make things look spiffy in Illustrator and Photoshop, I think the Peavy logo stands out more than ever. Sure, it’s a little busy and maybe hard to read, but nowhere near as bad as these black metal logos.

I pictured ITP’s logo as having a digital feel, but also round and human, maybe like fingers. Perhaps at an angle. So I started looking for rounded fonts and found VAG Rounded which looked exactly like what I was picturing. It wasn’t free, so I found BPreplay which was just as perfect.

Earlier drafts, trying to do something that maybe wasn’t necessary with the lines?