HOMAR Animated Logo

This website is a work in progress. Please check back soon for a description of this project!

In some circles, the designer who starts a new project, makes a logo for it, then promptly loses steam with just the logo done is practically a cliché. So when I set out to design the HOMAR library of robotics code, I forced myself to wait until the project was almost ready to release before making a logo. I wanted something that connected my robotics team, at the time called Spartan Robotics, to the technical content of the library, so I sketched some designs involving a Greek column and an omnidirectional wheel. Then, I taught myself the open-source vector graphics editor Inkscape and iterated on the design (see above). When I wanted an animated version that showed the wheel spinning, I went back to my roots with the Processing programming language and wrote a short program to rotate the proper part of the image, then used ImageMagick to compile the frames into an animated GIF (see below). The last image in the sequence above is a version developed for cutting and engraving with a laser cutter.

In the end, I may still have spent an inordinate amount of time on this logo, but I continue to benefit from the practice I got with free image manipulation tools.