Introducing Treefingers

When I was writing the code for the laravel version of my blog, I had created a repo, usmanity/treefingers (not available anymore), and I used it to keep track of my changes. 

I was really excited when I had started working on it so I decided to create a brand for it but it never was public and so now I’m going to make that brand part of this blog.

Treefingers comes from a song by Radiohead. You can hear it here: Treefingers by Radiohead (Spotify) .

I wanted to base the brand off something related to trees and fingers, there’s no real meaning for the word and the song so I’m interpreting it myself.

From the sun to the trees

Before I came up with the final design, I went through a couple of iterations. My initial representation for my blog was going to be the sol character in Unicode: ☉ 

And based off this concept I created the following:

Some were more for the mix of colors and some just because they represented the unicode character in a bit more detail. Then I wanted to keep going and trying to experiment and below are some concepts that now look ridiculous but I was just playing around at this point:

These represented something but not what my blog was, I think “simple solar”  would be a great one for a blog about space or something. The “unicode characters only” version looks weird now but at the time I thought it looked like a spaceship.

Below are some more but after these come the final ones.

After trying all these, I decided to step away from my computer and I wanted to rethink about what the name “Treefingers” meant and how I can properly represent it.

Without being too assuming, unaware, or insensitive, I did some research on a character that I had seen before, it’s a CJK character for half a tree trunk in CJK languages (Chinese, Japanese, and Korean). It looks like this: ⺦. As far as I can tell, this character doesn’t directly translate to anything.

Treefingers

So below are the final ones that I had to pick from:

As you’ll notice, it’s the ⺦character on it’s side, this is to make sure I’m not directly using the character and modifying it enough to be its own thing.

From here on, you’ll see this as the branding for this blog.