My logo was two letters — Danny Spina
02 WRITING / ENTRY DS·LOG····<br>My logo was two letters<br>DS. Like every developer who cannot draw.<br>2026–07–25 [projects]<br>HUMAN CONTENT 90% [?] — read what this means<br>My new Mark<br>This logo starts from a study. I am not a pure Designer and I think that designig a good Logo is one of the most difficult things a designer can do. Is so easy to design something niche but that do not resonate, or something that is too bloated, or just plain ugly.<br>I was exploring the work of the Ulm School of Design (where worked Otl aicher, Max Bill and others) and I found the study Otl Acher did on some of the Graphig works he did. They followed the whole idea behind the School of Ulm: the technics will lead the design work.<br>So, instead of thinking something fancy, I started from the Data.<br>The Name Problem<br>For years my logo was DS.<br>My initials, set in whatever the site font was at the time, in a box. If you are a developer, you know this logo. You probably have it. It is not a design decision, it is the absence of one, and it works fine right up to the moment it doesn’t.<br>This is the story of what replaced it, and of how the new mark ended up being decided by a pixel grid and the diameter of a milling cutter, and not by me.<br>The rabbit hole<br>A while ago I started repairing mechanical cameras again.<br>“Again”, because it used to be my job. Before I wrote software I was a Nikon repair technician. Then I did an apprenticeship, moved into development, and for years the only thing I opened was a laptop. At some point I missed having a machine in my hands badly enough to clear a corner of the desk and start over.<br>Not as a business, and not seriously. An experiment. At the moment my entire operation is a Nikon FE and an FM2 sitting on my desk, waiting to be sold.<br>But repairing something means reading its service manual, and that is where it started. Exploded views. Part numbers. Callouts. Tolerances written right next to the thing they describe. The whole visual language of an industry that had to explain a machine to somebody holding a screwdriver.<br>I had spent years with documents like these and never once looked at them. When you are using a manual you are hunting for one number and you look at nothing else. Coming back to it after all that time writing software, I finally saw the design.<br>I got completely lost in it, and from there into industrial design.<br>Then into interior design, and that one was deliberate. My home office needs sorting out, and I had been putting it off for a while, mostly because I could not say what I actually wanted it to look like.<br>And somewhere in there something clicked that had nothing to do with cameras.<br>Finding the name for a taste I already had<br>I have always liked a certain kind of object and never been able to say why.<br>It turns out there is a name for it, and I had been circling it for years without knowing: the Ulm School of Design. The Hochschule für Gestaltung, 1953 to 1968, the school that took what the Bauhaus started and swapped the artistic part for method, systems and measurement. Ulm is where Braun’s design language came from. It is the reason a 1970s Nikon and a 1970s Braun radio feel like they were made by the same people, even though they were not.<br>Reading about it was uncomfortable in a good way, because I recognised my own preferences in a place I had never looked.<br>I also spent thirteen years in Germany. I suspect that did something to my taste that I only noticed once somebody put a label on it.<br>Anyway: I now had a name for the thing, and a lot of energy.<br>The site, and then the problem<br>So I redesigned my site.<br>Not because the old one was broken, but because it no longer looked like where my head was. The new one is built on that language: grids, spec sheets, part numbers, a service procedure instead of a list of buzzwords. Archivo and JetBrains Mono. I enjoyed every minute of it.<br>And then I got to the header, and there it was.<br>DS.<br>On a page where every other decision had been made on purpose, the logo was the one element still sitting there as a placeholder. You cannot spend two weeks on a grid and then drop your initials in a box and call it done. It was the only lazy thing left, and it showed.<br>So, an actual study. And the obvious place to start is the name.<br>My surname is a machine part<br>My surname is Spina, and I have never particularly liked it.<br>I did not go looking for this. It came up in the middle of a long session of throwing ideas at an AI, somewhere between two bad ones.<br>A spina elastica is a spring pin: the pin that aligns two parts. It comes in two flavours, both standardised:<br>the slotted spring pin (ISO 8752), a hollow C-shaped cylinder with a slot running along its whole length<br>the coiled spring pin (ISO 8750), rolled from a thinner strip into a spiral<br>Both work the same way. Their outside diameter is slightly larger than the hole, so they compress when you drive them in and hold by pushing outwards, permanently.<br>They hold because they are not...