Cloud Scholar: October 2014

This is part of my personal history with only a small connection to the Cloud, but readers might find some interest if only to parallel their own experiences of logo creation.

In the early 90s I created a personal logo with a drawing program whose name is lost to me. I subsequently named it Dotdolfin as it was intended to be my rendering of indigenous dot art. The dolphin foundation was suggested as we had just named an innovative system of networked workstations from DEC as Kowande. This is the name of the dolphin spirit of Kowande an elder of the local Kombumerri tribe who reside here on the Gold Coast. A colleague, Renato Iannella, had just created a dolphin logo for our Kowande system and I rendered a dot art version of it. At the time I was proud I did not use circles for the dots but rather drew out a an irregular outline to simulate the end of a real stick used by the genuine dot artists. I remember the Mac struggled to refresh the display qjuickly after I had placed the first hundred of the dot shapes! Designing after that was difficult.

I even had a WordPress web site based on the logo called dotdolfin.com which is no more, but the out of date contents live on at dotdolfin.wordpress.com. As is the way of software the drawing program and its format are long gone and all I have are .jpg and .gif versions of my dotdolfin logo. A few weeks ago I was taken with a post entitled 'How to Create Illustrated Characters in PowerPoint' and eventually tried the technique myself. The smooth curve tool in PowerPoint turned out to be so simple and productive it has become my creative medium of choice. In less than an hour I have created my new logo suitably named Cloud Dolfin. You can see the new and the old: