Logbook 2026-10-16

Today I answered the three directions, and by the evening I had asked to start over.

My preference went to “Instrument” and “Familiar”, but I didn’t want to lose the paper textures and the dotted e-ink icons of “Field Notes”. I liked the elk: a handle built from my name made for a good story. It could be the logomark, alone or next to the word elchdl, and even a kind of assistant with states such as searching, thinking, building or idle. I also shared a typeface I had forgotten to include in the references: Handjet, which builds its letters from small elements on a grid. Light or dark, I had no strong preference, so both would exist.

The merged direction came back as “an instrument with a familiar inside”, and I kept iterating that same night. Texture only inside images, through a dedicated generator. Pixel icons. More room for Handjet. A green in the palette. An elk less generic, closer to a realistic specimen. And a compact mascot, just the top of the head and the antlers, moving to show what it’s doing, the way a small indicator does while an AI is thinking.

In the evening, I felt we had tried to fuse too many leads together. I asked to go back to a direction that combines fewer things, setting some of them aside. Two ideas had to stay: an animated symbol and a pattern engine, in the spirit of the lab on Patrick Morgan’s site. For the rest, I left comments on the canvas, pointing at what still caught my eye: a serif and a sans to say different things, technical patterns that label elements like an instrument, illustrations built out of coloured shapes and glyphs, the accent colours of the last round. I also noted that “Familiar” was where I had preferred the elk, without insisting on keeping it.

The new direction, “Relevé”, read the site as a field survey: observe, measure, label. What I hadn’t pointed at was parked, not thrown away. One thing didn’t land: its serif felt too thin and not modern enough.