For a long time now, the primary logo of my websites has been a kind of animal head with a gear inside of it. Originally, this was a nod to, well, being a furry obviously, but also to my online handle ‘querkmachine’. It’s like some sorta quirky machine furry, geddit?
It became even more relevant when my fursona changed to become a robot bat (or ‘robat’, because I’m fun like that), and the logo was adapted slightly to match the silhouette of that character. It henceforth took on the moniker of the ‘robat icon’.
The first iteration of that appeared around 2010, and has come come and gone at various points in that time. Most recently, it reappeared on this website at the end of August 2023, ironically just after I changed my fursona to no longer be a robot bat.
Despite such longevity, that logo has never really broken out of my personal website. It lived in the top corner of pages and in favicons and sharing images, but it never really appeared anywhere else.
You know what has made managed to make that leap?
Ash the amphimorpho’s goopy tail has spread further than the robat icon ever did.
It’s ended up being my logo entirely by accident. Might as well make it official, right?!
So, drumroll please… 🥁
Yeah, it’s the tail still. You read this far; that shouldn’t be a surprise.
This tail imagery was originally created by Caius Nocturne for use as an emoji. They were unfortunately unable to take on the task of adapting it into a logo, but gave their blessing for me to adapt it myself, including modifying the original licensing terms. Thanks Caius. 💚
I didn’t want to change things too heavily—I like it, after all—so the extent of my modifications has been removing the centre stroke separating the two fur colours and slightly altering the dimensions.
I’ve made variations with and without the outline along the bottom. The bottomless version is intended for contexts where it can sit flush against the edges of a container. The bottommore (which is logically the opposite of bottomless) version is for when the logo is disconnected from any such surface.
Oh, and also a single colour version for all the places I could use that kinda thing, like this website!
This is the first pass, and it’s admittedly a bit of a hack job I’ve done on Caius’s original assets, but the only way to begin is by beginning, so let’s see where this takes us.