So this morning I ran into this site full of comics critique and thinking. One bit that stuck with me in random reading is the idea that a good logo reads at 100 pixels wide – that’s the size your book’s gonna be in a thumbnail on a web store.

I like the current logo I have but it does not pass that test. So I booted up Illustrator and started playing around with different fonts.

Logos! Click for full-size.

Ultimately I came back to a variant of the original logo – it’s the same font; I really think the “sixties Saul Bass movie poster” kind of font tells you something about the kind of visuals you’ll find within. The high-tech tilted font was obviously a contender, but it was just too damn fiddly and really didn’t read well at small sizes. But that one lead me to the conflicting arrows motif, which I think really works with the story on multiple levels – it creates a sensation of horizontal motion, which both hints at the high-speed acrobatics of Rita-1 and prepares you for the weird narrative games I’m playing. And setting “Rita” into the arrow pointing the other way suggests complexity.

With a revised logo at hand, I of course had to see how it would work in context! So I knocked out a couple of cover thumbnails. With the first two, I tried putting it on the top, where a traditional comic would put it for maximum visibility on the rack. But it really felt wrong there, so I moved it to the middle, and tried a variant on the “chord” panel from the middle of chapter 4, then just went for head-and-shoulders crops of the various Ritae doing characteristic things.

I’ll probably play with it some more, and I suspect I’ll keep the original variant for the title page – but I think this dual-arrow version is much more powerful than just the text floating around with a couple arrows going through it.