Here’s a super quick history of the Z!NEdistro logo and the changes its gone through.
The O.G. back when we were a .com!
Yes, we use to be a zinedistro.com. Long story, but we’re not anymore. This first design wasn’t so much a logo design as just ‘zinedistro’ typed in a font called Thickets, or something like that.
Full word in Mailerart and Arial Black.
I think I was going for “look we’re down with the photocopy aesthetic and Web 2.0.” This was also my first time revisiting the design of the logo and site since its first design 3 years prior. It’s alright for a first go, but looking back it just feels heavy.
Z! Mailerart and Arial Black.
The smaller version of the previous mark for things like favicon and watermarks in software.
ZD! Mailerart and Arial Black.
Another abbreviated version which never really was used; again heavy.
Ligature Study In Red.
I had been rehashing the logo and decided, that it really needed a good ligature. Unfortunately, it didn’t have any of the obvious ones likes Æ or ffi or ſt. However upon doing some ligature research (for example, did you that the & character started out as a ligature for the letters ‘e’ and ‘t’; the latin word ‘et’ meaning ‘and’) over at wikipedia, I was reminded of the more playful, somewhat superfluous, ligature for ‘s’ and ‘t’ as in zinediSTro.
So upon remember this little guy: st, I set out at redesigning the logo. But I couldn’t find a font that felt right that had that ligature already available. So I did what any self respecting type nerd would do: I made the ligature by hand. It was harder and took longer than I was expecting. Several hours to get it just right.
After the ligature was ready and the rest of ‘distro’ I just had to sort out ‘zine’. I knew I was still going to use Arial Black, but I seemed to be stuck on all lowercase for a while. Even the site was lowercase all over the place. (I didn’t mean for that to rhyme.) So this was just one of the steps in the process of the ligature redesign.
PS. It was never going to be in red. I just had it all in red to see the ligature better while I worked on it and never changed it back in this copy.
Ligature Logo With ‘beta’.
The finished version (colored correctly) of the ligature logo; with the ‘beta’ flag flying.
Beta Free Ligature.
After we decided to drop the ‘beta’ flag.
