Copyfascism Watch Logo

Design by Jayel Aheram

Though plans for Copyfascism Watch were in the works long before its offi­cial launch, the logo made its debut even before the first post was drafted. In fact, the logo was cre­ated long before I had even set­tled the ques­tion of where will I be host­ing the blog — I finally decided on host­ing my blog in the Ludwig von Mises Institute Community, where I hope to dif­fer­en­ti­ate myself from the copy­left­ists that make up the bulk of the copyfight.

My first attempt at the logo con­sisted of swip­ing the Mises crest from the Institute’s web­site (with­out per­mis­sion, of course) and super-imposing faded copy­right sym­bols on it. The font color is inspired by the color scheme of the Mises crest, with its rich red and blue hues. The font face I chose was Courier New, a font with strong asso­ci­a­tions with the United States mil­i­tary. It is, by reg­u­la­tion, the stan­dard font used in nearly every page of the offi­cial doc­u­ments and cor­re­spon­dence typed up, printed, and deliv­ered by moti­vated com­pany clerks to and from their supe­ri­ors. The sim­ple banal­ity of the font, with its tra­di­tional type­face and utterly con­formist fixed-width, will serve to empha­size the utter, yet dan­ger­ous, dull­ness of copy­fas­cism. It is Serif! It is fixed-width! It looks like it belongs to a type-writer! It is per­fect! The logo lasted two weeks before I decided that a bet­ter, sim­pler logo was sorely needed.

I spent a grand total of fif­teen min­utes cre­at­ing the first ver­sion of the Copyfascism Watch logo. While I do not regret cre­at­ing it (I never regret any cre­ative expres­sion), I did feel that I can do a lot bet­ter. In the sec­ond attempt to cre­ate the blog’s logo, I made sure to review what it was that I did right in the first logo and see if I reuse some of the design ele­ments in the next attempt. I did not feel like rein­vent­ing the wheel; I just wanted to make it bet­ter. The font face, Courier New, stayed. Its sim­plic­ity and all of its Serif, fixed-width glory (as well as its mil­i­tary asso­ci­a­tions) empha­sizes the banal­ity of copy­fas­cism itself (I will admit, intel­lec­tual prop­erty is con­sid­ered nei­ther excit­ing nor sexy). The color scheme remained the same, with the word “fas­cism” high­lighted in blood red. Beyond the font face and the font color, how­ever, noth­ing was left of the old design.

The one that needed to go was the Mises crest. It was too strong of a design ele­ment for it to belong in a proper logo (at least, the Copyfascism Watch’s logo). And the way I imple­mented the design made it seem that the Institute was guilty of copy­fas­cism or was that it was any way asso­ci­ated with the blog besides host­ing it and inspir­ing the ide­ol­ogy dri­ving its arti­cles. My attempts to incor­po­rate the copy­right sym­bol into the orig­i­nal design failed mis­er­ably because of my inclu­sion of the Mises crest; there was no room for two aesthetically-opposite logos. By remov­ing the Mises crest and mak­ing the copy­right sym­bol a very promi­nent part of the new logo, I was able to solve two press­ing prob­lems: how to inform the casual vis­i­tor the pur­pose and sub­ject of the blog (i.e., copy­right, intel­lec­tual prop­erty) and scal­a­bil­ity. Being a uni­ver­sally rec­og­nized sym­bol, the copy­right sym­bol lends its mean­ing to the logo. Also, at any size, my logo will work; I can resize it the size of a bill­board or shrink it into a tiny web­site but­ton and it will still look the same.

I am not entirely happy with the final design. I wanted to evoke the Nazi insignia, with its red back­ground and strik­ing black swastika (yes, I real­ize that the Nazis were not fas­cist, but social­ist. But really, is there really any dif­fer­ence between the Nazi ide­ol­ogy of hate, Communism, and Mussolini’s Fascism?), but I grew attached to the clean white back­ground. The white back­ground allows me to trans­fer the design on dif­fer­ent col­ored back­ground besides white.