From The Desk of Nerd³ - February 2024 Edition (Patreon)

Dearest Patreons,

Unsurprisingly, I didn’t actually plan to change the logo again. I simply woke up a few weeks ago, saw that the latest video had gone up, and noticed the current logo on the thumbnail for the first time in a while. It didn’t look right anymore. Moments later photoshop was open and I was prototyping replacements. An 80s look? A blank VHS tape vibe? 70s retro? What’s next?

You see, people are like planets. They have less up top than they used to, their features shift around a lot over time, and they’re weak to large meteorites. By that I mean, while the sleek logo used to be who I was, it’s not anymore. Not really.

I think I can explain this better with a history lesson. If you’ll indulge me, it’s time for a deep delve into the Nerd³ logo over the years…

Logo Design 1: Mar 24, 2011 - Aug 27, 2011

The OG, originally “designed” for my webcomic, featured a white, flimsy looking ‘nerd’ and an equally unwell looking red ‘3’ next to it. It pops up at the start of my literally unwatchable vlogs and was so memorable you’ve already forgotten about it again.

This logo, like most of my early internet output, was made fast. I spent a few minutes finding a font I didn’t hate, picked some colours, and that was done. If anything, it reflects the fact that I had no idea what Nerd³ was going to be. YouTube was new and malleable, and anything could come from it. I was ready to fling everything at the wall, just to see what could possibly stick.

Mercifully, it wasn’t this awful logo.

Logo Design 2: Aug 27, 2011 - Dec 24, 2011

It took just five months for me to throw baby’s first photoshop away and replace it with a marvel-esq comic flick through, mostly intended to advertise myself to the colossal audience over at Machinima. If you’ve been around for a while, this logo might be the reason why you came here in the first place.

The downside was that this variation of the OG logo only existed in the animated world. If I needed a stationary logo, I had to use the old, knackered one. While I continued to use this over at Machinima for a while longer, I needed something better, something that would last me much, much longer…

Logo Design 3: Dec 26, 2011 - Aug 24, 2012

It wasn’t this. While the red outline, white text appearance became the staple for the next decade and a bit, the skinny logo didn’t last anywhere near that long. Oh, it was a good run, first appearing in that classic video… “Automatic Arrow Bomb - Minecraft Tutorial” (!?), and taking us through many Plays videos, the first Free Games Friday, the Sims 3 completes, and that bizarrely popular Driver: San Francisco video before being swapped out for a new, longer lasting design. However, thanks to the ongoing Spore completes, and the fact that I was too lazy to change the thumbnails for them, it lived on for another month or so, haunting the place, unwanted, like a giant bowl of egg mayonnaise at the back of your fridge, three days after the wedding.

Logo Design 4: Jul 27, 2012 - Sep 15, 2017

For many of you, this will be the Nerd³ logo. For a whopping 1,876 days, this was the welcome mat to each and every one of my videos. Hundreds, maybe even thousands of hours of entertainment, all with this little git floating in at the start. It’s on my wrestling belt. Hell, it’s in Just Cause 3!

Again, this wasn’t a long design process. I found a font I liked and applied the red glow to it. However, this time I spent at least a couple of hours tweaking it. I found a complimentary font for the series ideas (oh, so many series ideas) and made sure that they’d all look good with it too. It kept the comic style of my past, but was bigger, bolder, brighter. It called to you to click it. To watch it. To love it. To buy T-shirts with it on.

While I do love this design, it’s an absolute mess. The ‘3’ isn’t attached, what the fuck is that ‘R’ doing, and oh baby do I hate that skinny middle bit of the ‘N’. It looks like any amount of pressure on it would snap it, which it did. This logo was last seen on a video announcing that I was done with YouTube and taking a break. ‘Twas beauty that killed this beast.

Wait… not beauty. Burnout.

Logo Design 5: Sep 16, 2017 – NOW

When I returned, in what internet historians will refer to as my ‘Weird Era’, I wanted a logo to reflect the massive change I was planning. It was sleek, modern, dare I even say it… more adult? Hell, I was married now! I was going to be an author! You can’t just piss about with a shit logo when you’re an author! Books aren’t meant to be fun you know!

At 2,339 days, this is unbelievably the longest serving logo. While that may sound surprising, I think it just shows what YouTube as a platform became for me over this period. As we crashed through a pandemic and other assorted bullshit, YouTube as a platform stopped inspiring me. The logo remained because I forgot it was even there in the first place. Last year we made just nine videos, although to be fair, that was mostly because of the unbelievable prick next door and his never ending building work. (He’s now working on Sundays too. WHAT A LOVELY PERSON.)

To me, this logo now represents my breakup with YouTube. I still loved making videos, but I used to love YouTube as a platform too. To me it used to be a bunch of awesome, creative people, doing awesome, creative things, and now I see it as a bunch of twats punching each other while selling kids a drink with more sugar in it than Willy Wonka’s river of chocolate. It feels like we lost the battle for this platform. Hell, if you take what the internet has become since 2011 as a whole, you might as well say we lost the war.

Logo Design 6: NOW - ???

So if I lost, why am I back? Because fuck it, that’s why.

YouTube may not be the font of creativity that it once was, but that doesn’t mean that there’s not anything great on there. Red Letter Media is the best movie review channel set in a care home you’ll ever see, CrackerMilk produce hilarious sketches that somehow release every couple of days, and Second Wind feels like reading an old video game magazine, but on the internet! Sure, making YouTube videos isn’t going to challenge me anymore, but who gives a shit? I’ve got books for that! Horribly complicated to plot books! Yay!

So, YouTube is fun again. I’m having a blast, and felt like a change. But… to what?

One game I’m really excited for this year is the Tomb Raider I – III remasters. Not only am I excited to play these fantastic games again, I am completely in love with the art direction for the updated (optional) graphics. Instead of polishing them to modern standards, all ultra HD textures that would have looked out of place in the blocky world of PS1 Lara, they’ve gone subtler. Lighting improvements here, texture changes there, swapping out billboard pickups for 3D models etc etc. What you end up with is a set of games that look straight out of your memories of 1996, instead of actually looking like they’re from 1996. Huge improvements, without changing the atmosphere. Fourteen days until release. Can’t wait.

Anyway, that was the design concept for this new logo. This isn’t anything like how the old logo looked, but it feels like it is. It feels like it stepped out of 2011 YouTube. That’s the channel ethos going forward. I’m not here to push the boundaries, to see what this platform can do. That’s now been explored. This is a known system. Thirteen years later, and I finally understand what Nerd³ is. It’s a good time. Nothing more. Nothing less.

On a technical level, the final version of this logo was made in Illustrator, not Photoshop. That’s right, this baby is a vector. Only took me thirteen years to work out how to do that, and considering that I learn Photoshop for my old comic and it’s logo, it seems appropriate. It also, for the first time in history, took me more than one draft and a few hours to make.

So there we have it, the dawn of a new Nerd³. In a couple of weeks, this logo will appear everywhere, heralding a new age. A special age, because I know for a fact that this will be the longest lasting one. This is who I am now, and that’s not going to change.

Well, not yet anyway…

Happy leap year.

Daniel

xx