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New Medium Logo: Proposal #1

I am not a logo designer, but I can throw things together in Paintshop Pro and write pretentious nonsense about them.

Holly Jahangiri
5 min readOct 15, 2020

I showed Medium’s new logo to my husband.

Being the diplomatic pragmatist that he is, and always eager to play Devil’s Advocate when I cannot constrain a derisive giggle, he asked, “What’s wrong with it?”

“What’s right with it?” I countered.

“It’s unique.”

I burst out laughing. This is the man who says, “It’s interesting,” when he really means, “Holy shit, what fresh Hell is this?”

“So is mine,” I proudly proclaim, and show him this:

Ebullient Logo Concept Copyright 2020 H. Jahangiri

“That may be…too unique.”

“Wait, now, hear me out…” I begin to formulate a pretentious “artist’s statement.” My daughter used to be very good at this — when she was 15, I envisioned her having a lucrative career writing blurbs for the little explanatory plaques hanging next to museum installations of modern and abstract art. Without those little explanatory blurbs, Jo Baer’s “Brilliant Yellow #9 is just a yellow-painted border on a plain rectangle of blank canvas. Without explanation, Marcel Duchamp’s “Fountain” is just a porcelain urinal signed in black Sharpie marker.

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Holly Jahangiri
Holly Jahangiri

Written by Holly Jahangiri

Writer and Kid-at-Heart, often found at https://jahangiri.us. Subscribe to my (free!) Newsletter: https://hollyjahangiri.substack.com

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