The Making of the Logo

Inspiration

This logo was one of my first projects using vector art, and I wanted it to carry real meaning. It was inspired by the ShellSharks logo by Mike Sass, which balances complexity and a clean aesthetic exceptionally well. His design is detailed and symbolic, yet still cohesive, plus every time you look at it, you notice something new. I admired that level of thoughtfulness and depth and aimed to achieve something similar in my own way.

Specifically, from Mike’s logo, his Yggdrasil (Tree of Life) concept– structured around the Cyber Kill Chain– stuck with me. I loved the idea of a central framework connecting different domains, but I wanted my version to reflect the specific areas of cybersecurity that interest me most.

Read more about ShellSharks And Mike’s logo creation process here: https://shellsharks.com/

Iconography

A major influence was one of my favorite movies growing up, Treasure Planet– Disney’s sci-fi adaptation of Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson.

(Spoilers ahead.) In the film, the legendary pirate Captain Flint is able to amass a vast fortune by using a portal that opens to remote destinations across the galaxy, and stores it all on Treasure Planet– ‘the loot of a thousand worlds’.

In my logo, that portal represents knowledge, while each planet symbolizes a domain of cybersecurity. The largest planet is the red giant, which represents red teaming and offensive security, placed at the bottom to reflect how foundational it is to my interest in cybersecurity. At the top there is a moon, which is there because in the movie, there’s a spaceport which looks like a crescent moon, until the camera zooms in and you realize it’s actually full of ships and activity. In my design, the moon represents community, knowledge sharing, and technical communication, and it is at the top of the triangle because I believe that it’s the most important aspect of cybersecurity.

The smaller brown planet represents low-level and hardware hacking, marked with a microprocessor and PCB patterns to show my interest in hardware and low level systems. Lastly, The larger orange planet stands for infrastructure and defensive security, featuring a shield with an eye to represent vigilance and protection. I would have made this blue team planet actually blue, but I wanted to keep the clean aesthetic by using a matching color palette for my website’s color scheme.

Closing

Anyways, I had a blast putting this logo together, and I'm quite satisfied with how it came out. Huge shoutout to Photopea.com for allowing users like me free access to a professional-level toolset. </>