The Platonic Music Engine has a logo!

When designing a logo for the Platonic Music Engine I read fourteen textbooks on the subject, purchased several programs that promised to make the process easier, and changed my name to Saul Bass.

I should have just talked to Greg Taylor.

Who is Mr Taylor? Artist and graphic designer extraordinaire! I met him through a mutual friend, the lovely and talented composer Michael Collins. Collins and I have formed something of a composer’s collective patterned not at all on but perhaps slightly not un-resembling Les Six.

Before I jump into my normal rambling torrent of words, here’s the darned thing. If you don’t care for the really cool and interesting details behind the process of creating the logo (with an explanation from Mr Taylor himself!) then you can stop reading (but keep looking) here.

Nifty, eh?

When I approached Mr Taylor about producing a logo for the PME I had a couple of ideas. Given the big “Platonic” right there in the name of the engine and how I use Platonic Ideals as a kind of metaphor for how the software produces and then manipulates music, it only made sense to make some kind of reference to Plato and his philosophy.

Right? This graphic design stuff is super easy!

My big idea was to render an eighth note as a Platonic Solid. I did. And then I did it again. And again. Some thirty times. All of them looked horrible. And then I decided to make a bit more abstract with fuzzy colors or something. My failures came even swifter than before. This dragged on for weeks.

Turns out this graphic design stuff ain’t so easy.

But Mr Taylor liked my initial idea well enough so that in the space of a few hours produced the logo you see above which just happens to be about 1000 times better than my best effort.

I then asked him if he’d contribute a few words about his process and very graciously he provided the following (with minor edits):

Reading many of your posts on reddit and listening to the music generated, I got an introduction to some of what your work is about. I worked with some of the following themes and motifs:

Process, Engine, Shaping – Maybe it is just from the subset of what I read, but the bulk of what makes the P.M.E. unique seems to be the algorithms used to convert your Ideal and Platonic scores into a form that folks will accept as music.

Monument, Classical, Memorial – You use terms that evoke an idea of deep time. Referring to Plato’s forms works both in the sense of an abstracted ideal and also echos the theme of remembrance and memorializing the dead.

Notation, Typography, Language – You are not content to allow the Platonic Score to remain abstract, and this project runs into some awesome notation system issues. I’ve read some brief bits where you engage these issues, but would be interested to see these issues explored even more.

These are not concepts that I intend to accurately sum up your work, but rather are intended to give some idea of the context that I began to put together. Brainstorming some visual material that fits within this context looked something like this in my mind:

You can see in the Inkscape file that I started by roughly describing a musical eighth note in simple, mathematical forms. Pursuing this concept, I ended up with a very simplified, circular design [image not shown].

At this point, I had a composition that strongly suggested Notation, Typography, Language. I wasn’t thrilled, though: it hardly referenced a lot of the other concepts I was hoping for. Back to the drawing board.

You can see that at this point [ditto], I took some of the underlying structure, and added additional geometry. I hoped that in this way I could evoke the visual cues of gears, blueprints, or (bonus points for culturally mirroring the P.M.E. name) a Euclidean proof. I also angled the design somewhat to make the musical note a little less immediately recognizable and overwhelming. The intention here was bring more of the Process, Engine, Shaping flavor to the forefront, and I really think it worked.

At this point, I had always assumed that I would keep the design black and white. Black and white communicates music notation very strongly, and I wanted to keep that in the design. However, I realized that the design quite literally had a music note in it, and communicating that same concept in color was a little redundant. I suddenly had the opportunity to use color to communicate another part of your work. I went with colorful transparencies, in the hopes that it might remind one of a stained glass window. This was intended to further the concept of a memorial, but I am really not sure it does. I never changed the scheme, but I think that the color work is the weakest part of the whole design.

There was a second, unanticipated problem. I created this design to be used large or small, as a cover illustration or a desktop icon. In that latter function, this design failed miserably [ditto].

The transparencies just don’t play well with a background that is not white. In an attempt to cater to this possible use case, I added the black and white circle background [ditto].

At this point I had a file that communicated most of the concepts I was looking for. I made some adjustments for practical purposes, since I wasn’t familiar with the exact use case.

And that, sans a few images (the editing and uploading of which proved too much for this simple composer), is the that!

I’m really impressed with how that original eighth note that I wanted is present in the logo but it’s not all that obvious. And how the surrounding circles suggest, without hitting you over the head, the engineness of the project. It’s all subtle and aesthetically pleasing.

Once again, Mr Taylor did a terrific job on the logo and I am forever grateful!