There are two more doodles for the virtual refrigerator here, both leveraging my time with the Creative Coding course to experiment with the Minnesota Mandolin Orchestra logo that Ronda designed for the orchestra.

Making a rubber stamp for the orchestra is a neglected item on my todo list and I’m not confident that the existing logo will make a good stamp. The text is small in comparison to the rest of the logo and I worry that the bulk of the logo will leave so much ink as to bleed through paper and will only be useful to stamp document margins, which can easily be trimmed and discarded.

Below is the result of using the JavaScript Canvas API to wrap text letter by letter on an arc path. I decided to take a programmatic approach, rather than use a sketch app, to allow me to quickly update the text and image proportions and line weights.

Thinking further about logos, I enrolled in another Domestika short course on logo design to better understand accepted aesthetics. The first assignment is to reimagine an existing logo. Since the MMO logo was already on my mind, I thought I’d take a stab at making its text more prominent and accentuating the mandolin shape. This time I used a mix of JavaScript and Inkscape sketches to allow me to quickly address and archive issues around font choice, size, and placement while giving me the freedom of incorporating SVG shapes that I drew by hand.

I’m not sold on the combination of a decorative font that changes contrast, so perhaps a simpler and slightly larger font could be used. The logo might also benefit from using the same colors as the original.