Q-Logo

Sun Microsystems

I like clever usage of name or at least a key letter in logo of product or company. My dream target was something like Sun Microsystems.

My requirements was quite clear:

• It should be stylized "Q",
• looks good (or at least is recognizible) as 16x16 px favicon,
• circle or square (not rectangular),
• bold lines, carvable for stickers,
• not too complex in vectors.

My minor requirements were to utilize golden ratio or be symmetric.

QeX (animated)

I felt little depleted and without invention, so I asked my younger brother, who does graphics and has good ideas, to help me. He offered me few designs and the first one gave me an idea to try invert and merge some colors. It has everything I expected.

I did some improvements, grooming and polishing, like determine width and thickness. The width would be 11 units, 1+3+3+3+1. The blue circle in the middle would have the same radius, as border of the outer blue rectangle; 1.5 units.

My brother's idea

My edit

Final version

The biggest surprise was when I tried to recreate it in SVG. I used Inkscape for edit, but the SVG output was too big. I tried to rewrite it in text editor. I found out the final layout will consits only from a single square, a single circle and a single line. I played with the blue as well. I really like the blue Google uses on focused input elements (#4D90FE), but it was too random for my taste. After some tries I ended up with nicer and web safe #6699CC (6-9-12).


I really like it, no matter I keep hearing it looks like a Pac-Man ;-) I see a harddisk, which is great icon for data platform.

I tried to modify it over the time, for example it still bugs me that I didn't use golden ratio (which is quite hard to achieve in concentric design :) or that I didn't used guide circles better. But so far it always ended by rollback.