Identity Development

Y’all wanna hear a story about why me and this logo here fell out????????? It’s kinda long but full of self indulgence^[1].

But seriously, it’s time to lay to rest the original Routine Chaos logo. I’m honestly surprised it lasted as long as it did, given its inauspicious origins: it was something I threw together in 20 minutes the first time that I ever needed to send someone an invoice. It was so long ago that I used Sketch to make it - Sketch! When’s the last time anyone used Sketch? And then I thought it was good enough that I used it on the old Substack and have let inertia carry it forward until now. At the time I was hoping for something that was a bit playful and used asymmetry to suggest some gentle chaos. Through the years, people have commented on the name, but no one remembers the logo^[2].

Routine Chaos has evolved a lot since then. For the first few years that it was officially a design studio, I struggled to articulate what exactly we do. The honest version of it was probably something like, “My friends and former colleagues who I really like working with bring me into their new projects to help them solve really complicated problems related to building new products and services.” But I was also in exploration mode. Hell, I still am in exploration mode and probably in some sense always will be, but those explorations are taking a sharper focus.

Routine Chaos today is a design studio that focuses on building the foundations for a creative society^[3]. Most of the work involves designing environments, building tools, and developing resources for communities of builders, makers, and creators. I love the projects we’ve been working on over the past few years^[4], and I’m more comfortable with the fact that this is the space we hold.

Our identity as a studio is evolving, so it seemed fitting that we needed a new visual identity to go along with it. This time around, I wanted to bring out both the routine and the chaos - I wanted something that was both busy and ordered, something that captured the imperfect beauty of diverse ideas colliding.

Drumroll please…

Here it is:

oh, a little easter egg

I printed a shirt for myself with the new logo because I wanted to see what it would look like out in the world and because print on demand is fun. I was wearing it in Seattle when the barista at one of those speciality coffee shops I so enjoy commented on it, “Hey, cool shirt. Where did you get it?” And I, of course, spoke way too fast and said, “Oh no, I’m sorry…it’s just a sweatshirt for my design studio. It’s not something you can order.” And he was like, “that’s cool.” And then he looked at my credit card and continued, “Whoa - it’s your design studio, and your name is Seth, and Seth is the Egyptian god of chaos.” And I gave him a knowing wink.

And then I decided to print up some sweatshirts. Do you want one? They’re pretty cozy and can ship anywhere in the world. If you want to rock the Routine Chaos sweatshirt, I created a paid membership tier for this newsletter where really the only benefit is that for $50 you get the sweatshirt. You can get it right here.