The creation of the Intend logo

The story and symbolism of the Ꮖ-shaped droplet logo

Context

My intentionality app used to be called Complice, and I’ve just renamed it Intend. As part of that, of course, I needed a new logo, especially because the old logo was based around the letter C. Logos need to speak for themselves, and logo redesign articles are often a bit overwrought, but nonetheless I wanted to share my process as part of just being transparent, as well as some of my thinking around the symbolism in the logo I choose.

Ideation

I wasn’t sure how well something letter-i-shaped would work (and would it be a capital or lowercase i?) but I made a list of “fragments themes concepts”:

• intentionality

• infinity

• eye

• awareness

• consciousness

• action

• motion

• letter i

• arrow

• towards

• enso

• pen & paper, journal

• magic

• flame

• energy, direction

…and I sketched this tiny not-very-inspired exploration of combining “letter i” with “arrow” with “towards”:

I explored what kinds of symbols people use to express notions like intentionality and somehow came across this pretty random collection of psychology-related images, but none of them really inspired me.

I somehow found my way to a page of divine symbols and someone claimed this complex yin-yang-like symbol represented consciousness. I don’t really see it, but it is a really cool form of symmetry with negative space:

I thought a bit about the enso, the zen open circle, and I thought about somehow making it be the iris of an eye… or putting a checkmark inside the kind of 2-pointed oval that is an eye-shape…

I tried getting GPT-4 to brainstorm for me, and it reinvented the Effective Altruism logo (a lightbulb with a heart) but aside from that and a Seedling+Hourglass idea, there wasn’t much of interest there.

Insight

Who knows if any of that ideation helped? It didn’t directly open any paths or lead to anything, but a week or so later I had a sudden flash of insight and wrote in my notes “fuck [[brainstorming new logo ideas]] — one just CAME to me”.

It took less than a minute to make this mockup, for reasons that will become clear momentarily:

The moment I saw it, I knew I was on the right track. I wrote down a list of “things I like about it”, starting with:

• it looks like a capital Ꮖ

• it sort of vaguely has eyes in it but without being creepy/surveillance

• it evokes mindfulness

• it evokes water droplets / ripples

• it's similar to the Complice logo in some ways, so there’s a bit of continuity

• it's minimalist, has lots of symmetry

But it goes way deeper. The origin of this symbol was realizing that there was a really simple way to remix the mindfulness symbol into the shape of a capital Ꮖ. And that’s a symbol that I’d already started using in the app UI awhile ago, as a spacious loading image for the present-moment-centered Now Page.

The people who made the mindfulness symbol say on their site “Mindfulness symbol is open-source and free to use” and “While the symbol can be used as a part of a logo (e.g. for a yoga studio or similar), the symbol cannot be registered as a commercial trademark.” which seems to me like my remix is abundantly in the spirit and letter of the law. I see them as wanting this symbol to be public-domain in much the same way that a heart is, or a christian cross, or a peace symbol.

And it seems to me like my remix will be different enough that it could be trademarked. They’re also clearly pro-remix—their site shows lots of examples of tattoos where it's been remixed pretty substantially:

Creative tension

I immediately noticed that in addition to mindfulness + Ꮖ-shape, there was another exciting thing about this new shape I’d come up with.

The mindfulness symbol is oriented towards presence in the now. The site talks about how mindfulness is the antidote to autopilot.

But I’m not the first person to observe that mindfulness in the form of counting breaths on a cushion is missing something pretty important about life, which is movement, direction, change, and will. Intentionality. Which is what Intend is all about. Presence, yes, but also desire.

And I noticed that one way to experience the new logo is that it evokes a kind of creative tension between the top and the bottom. Creative tension is a term that Robert Fritz uses to describe the feeling of being drawn to change something because you can see how it could be different from it is, and you want it to be different. And that gap produces creativity towards figuring out how to close it.

In Perceptual Control Theory (a model of cognition & behavior that I find quite powerful for thinking about goals & motivation at all scales) they talk about this same structure. You have:

• “reference level” (vision / goal / target)

• “perceived level” (current reality / today / now)

• and the difference between those is called an “error” (gap, creative tension)

These words are all a bit cumbersome, as they come from control systems engineering not from the world of subjective experiencing and doing. So I’ve been thinking for years that I want a better word than “error” (which comes from control systems engineering) to point at that gap between the reference level and the perceived level. “Creative tension” is evocative but too long and jargony. One is tempted towards words like “goal” but at least as a metaphor they’re more about the reference level (⚽➔🥅) than about the gap itself. PJ Eby tried renaming it “energy”, which is seriously not bad but it’s kinda vague.

Then I realized in the course of choosing the name Intend that the closest existing English word for this gap is “intention”. And the logo symbolizes it with that gap between top & bottom.

Maybe I’ll write a longer article about this too at some point!

Refinements to the logo

Once I started feeling into this new design, I realized that it was a bit unbalanced—the central column, which fit beautifully in the mindfulness symbol, now looked narrow & weak, like it might break & fall over. Meanwhile the top and bottom droplets now felt a bit large.

I went through a number of iterations… closing the outer rings, playing around with colors, and trying out various larger shapes in the middle and smaller droplets at the top and bottom…

…and I noticed another question: vertical symmetry. The original shape (both the mindfulness symbol and my first Ꮖ-shaped mockup above) has mirror symmetry both ways. But when I tried strengthening the center by putting a single droplet shape there, it had to go either up or down.

It then occurred to me that something felt quite beautiful about having a kind of antigravity energy to the whole thing. After all, the very essence of what Intend is about is about living your life, and life is about creating a lil pocket of the universe where (against all odds) entropy doesn’t go up. This is the essence of what it means to have agency—that you’re warping the world around you to make things happen that don’t happen via “inanimate” laws of physics.

Life is not in contradiction with physics, by any means (that would be absurd) but physics does not directly account for will and intention, which from a subjective perspective are obviously real and obviously extremely important. It doesn’t account for choice & agency, and some friends of mine were saying recently that (surprisingly!) it barely accounts for causality. Most physics equations, in both Newtonian and Einsteinian physics, run the same independent of which way you point the time arrow.

So I found myself thinking that I liked the idea of some sort of upward energy to the whole thing.

I played around with some ideas for that but my partner pointed out that they were getting further and further from being remotely plausible water shapes. Right: back to the original metaphor! I stared at some frames of slow-motion videos of water droplets, and noticed the glorious upwardness here:

And traced that shape to create the following, which I love:

The way the water stretches back up feels beautifully aspirational, and then it’s as if the droplet goes into the ripples at the top. Or something! Perhaps.

Overall it feels like a potent shape, that you can read a lot into if you want, but that also makes sense if you don’t look too closely. And at a really small size, like a favicon (the icon in your browser tab) it’s basically just an oddly-textured Ꮖ, and that’s totally fine.

Intend logo meaning

So, in summary, we’ve got:

• an Ꮖ shape, which mostly is just to tie it with the name but hey you could take it as pointing at subjectivity, which we’re definitely about 😉

• water droplet imagery, representing the ripple effect of taking actions and having their effects flow into the world 💧

• centeredness, mindfulness, presence 🧘

• a tension/intention between the world we long for and the world we see around us 👁️

If this vibe resonates with how you want to orient to your life, you can try the app here.