Continuing to play with the space, light cone, time, warning light, and blue dot elements, here’s another. I’m not trying to symbolize longtermism specifically here, but I do think this arrangement fits something present.
Colors
I like the thinking behind the color choices in the original, so I tried to do that too.
- Eigengrau instead of black: Eigengrau is the almost-black color humans see when we close our eyes in darkness, darkness as perceived by human vision. It’s black with visual artifacts of uncountably many points of light. It rhymes with how we see space, and represents the eyes-closed opposite of enlightenment.
- pale yellow instead of white: stark white feels lifeless/barren/rhetorical, while sunlight is a human universal. Technically that color would be rather more blue, but I didn’t want 3:1 in cold’s favor, and our experience of sunlight is “warm”.
- global blue : I like ocean blue, but global blue is traditional and recognizable.
- almost-red shocking pink: this color was tricky and unsatisfying. True traditional red is associated with the vigorous bloodshed of war. Amber felt slower, like plasma seepage and electronic running lights. But comparing them side by side, this weird in-between color feels more right. I don’t know from whence it comes and it’s troubling me, and that feeling seemed to fit, so I went with the red-pink. And disagreeing about whether this particular shade is red or pink would be the kind of moving-concepts-around time-wasting disagreement that so often distracts resources from problem-solving.
Shapes
Four-pointed star: a focus, or flaw that draws focus - orienting star (compass star, North star, Star of Bethlehem, LessWrong, Alcor, Quaker star) - how stars or points of light appear to us, for reasons I’m not competent to explain— Once I saw the bright “shadows” created by bubbles on the surface of water concentrating sunlight on the stone below, and at a certain depth the anti-shadows looked like curved four-pointed stars. - the shape of a wound created by an X-shaped cut
Semicircle: the known world - as a sphere: planet, sphere of influence - as a hemispherical bubble: habitat, growth, celestial heavens of antiquity - as an arc: arc of history/narrative, rise and fall
Arrangement/assembly/explication
The darkness is unknown. Can contain risk, ignorance, space, void, death, etc. as you like.
Enlightenment is a growing buffer between the world and the unknown. Can contain hope, mercy, knowledge, skill, empathy, consciousness, energy etc. as you like.
Darkness holds three corners, and light one. However, darkness holds less than half the area.
The expansion of hope/mercy/enlightenment has both a linear and a non-linear growth aspect.
This star/wound/pain/warning/flaw connects the three, or is in all three. It sometimes obscures what’s going on between the other three. It’s the central focus. It’s in the middle of everything.
From left to right, there’s a progression in time from the beginning in void to the post-world end where enlightenment dominates, yet cannot eliminate the unknown.
Does the story arc get interrupted, or obscured? And is this burst of pain an event in time, or a constant element? Is the wound in the middle opening or closing? Does pain orient or distract?
Reflection
In retrospect, I may be guilty of being quite influenced by other brands I like. I was not consciously thinking of these when I was working on this design, so I’m not sure how much is my fault and how much is convergence/overlap. - Black triangle on top-left, yellow on the right: I have previously considered myself anarcho-capitalist. - red and black Quaker star: I don’t know what the Quaker star symbolizes, but I like the connotations of humility, principles, service, and insistence on a kinder future. I don’t “identify” as anything religious, but I occasionally attend the local Friends’ Meeting.
The result also reminds me of Jordan Peterson’s work: in a world made of chaos, order, suffering, and matter, one needs a negative motivation, a positive motivation, a foundation to stand on, and a direction in which to go. “Life is suffering,” but what you do about that is up to you.
Made using Amadine. An editable SVG version is here in case you want to build on it further.
I was missing something important before about the aspirational nature of a flag. While the star held something true about there being actually hard, knock-out problems to solve along the way, I think the inevitability of the star-less version is more suitably aspirational.
There is not one singular problem to solve, there are many, and the other shapes already hold that. With the star, I had put an oppositional teleology before the indefinite striving for betterment, and that was out of order. That was more ‘per ardua ad astra,’ “through adversity to the stars,” this is more ‘sic itur ad astra,’ “such is the way to the stars.” Let us not be defined by the battles we have won, but by the ideals we pursue, through and beyond whatever difficulty may come...
I’ve kept the star’s color. The hope is that the future is better in both quantity and quality, so having the color brighten as the area expands shows that it’s not just more of the same. I’m annoyed with the gradient technically, I think it breaks the simplicity rule of flag design by making it a lot harder to draw the flag from memory or print it in a standard way. Oh well. SVG here.
This is a pretty stylish flag, and I liked the thought process behind it. I must admit that when I first saw it I thought it looked like the sort of flag the villains would have though! Would it be possible to check out how it might look if the central star was blue? I feel like the middle bit instinctually represents ‘us’, and we want to be the good guys.
Continuing to play with the space, light cone, time, warning light, and blue dot elements, here’s another. I’m not trying to symbolize longtermism specifically here, but I do think this arrangement fits something present.
Colors
I like the thinking behind the color choices in the original, so I tried to do that too.
- Eigengrau instead of black: Eigengrau is the almost-black color humans see when we close our eyes in darkness, darkness as perceived by human vision. It’s black with visual artifacts of uncountably many points of light. It rhymes with how we see space, and represents the eyes-closed opposite of enlightenment.
- pale yellow instead of white: stark white feels lifeless/barren/rhetorical, while sunlight is a human universal. Technically that color would be rather more blue, but I didn’t want 3:1 in cold’s favor, and our experience of sunlight is “warm”.
- global blue : I like ocean blue, but global blue is traditional and recognizable.
- almost-red shocking pink: this color was tricky and unsatisfying. True traditional red is associated with the vigorous bloodshed of war. Amber felt slower, like plasma seepage and electronic running lights. But comparing them side by side, this weird in-between color feels more right. I don’t know from whence it comes and it’s troubling me, and that feeling seemed to fit, so I went with the red-pink. And disagreeing about whether this particular shade is red or pink would be the kind of moving-concepts-around time-wasting disagreement that so often distracts resources from problem-solving.
Shapes
Four-pointed star: a focus, or flaw that draws focus
- orienting star
(compass star, North star, Star of Bethlehem, LessWrong, Alcor, Quaker star)
- how stars or points of light appear to us, for reasons I’m not competent to explain—
Once I saw the bright “shadows” created by bubbles on the surface of water concentrating sunlight on the stone below, and at a certain depth the anti-shadows looked like curved four-pointed stars.
- the shape of a wound created by an X-shaped cut
Semicircle: the known world
- as a sphere: planet, sphere of influence
- as a hemispherical bubble: habitat, growth, celestial heavens of antiquity
- as an arc: arc of history/narrative, rise and fall
Arrangement/assembly/explication
The darkness is unknown. Can contain risk, ignorance, space, void, death, etc. as you like.
Enlightenment is a growing buffer between the world and the unknown. Can contain hope, mercy, knowledge, skill, empathy, consciousness, energy etc. as you like.
Darkness holds three corners, and light one. However, darkness holds less than half the area.
The expansion of hope/mercy/enlightenment has both a linear and a non-linear growth aspect.
This star/wound/pain/warning/flaw connects the three, or is in all three. It sometimes obscures what’s going on between the other three. It’s the central focus. It’s in the middle of everything.
From left to right, there’s a progression in time from the beginning in void to the post-world end where enlightenment dominates, yet cannot eliminate the unknown.
Does the story arc get interrupted, or obscured?
And is this burst of pain an event in time, or a constant element?
Is the wound in the middle opening or closing?
Does pain orient or distract?
Reflection
In retrospect, I may be guilty of being quite influenced by other brands I like. I was not consciously thinking of these when I was working on this design, so I’m not sure how much is my fault and how much is convergence/overlap.
- Black triangle on top-left, yellow on the right: I have previously considered myself anarcho-capitalist.
- red and black Quaker star: I don’t know what the Quaker star symbolizes, but I like the connotations of humility, principles, service, and insistence on a kinder future. I don’t “identify” as anything religious, but I occasionally attend the local Friends’ Meeting.
The result also reminds me of Jordan Peterson’s work: in a world made of chaos, order, suffering, and matter, one needs a negative motivation, a positive motivation, a foundation to stand on, and a direction in which to go. “Life is suffering,” but what you do about that is up to you.
Made using Amadine. An editable SVG version is here in case you want to build on it further.
I was missing something important before about the aspirational nature of a flag. While the star held something true about there being actually hard, knock-out problems to solve along the way, I think the inevitability of the star-less version is more suitably aspirational.
There is not one singular problem to solve, there are many, and the other shapes already hold that. With the star, I had put an oppositional teleology before the indefinite striving for betterment, and that was out of order. That was more ‘per ardua ad astra,’ “through adversity to the stars,” this is more ‘sic itur ad astra,’ “such is the way to the stars.” Let us not be defined by the battles we have won, but by the ideals we pursue, through and beyond whatever difficulty may come...
I’ve kept the star’s color. The hope is that the future is better in both quantity and quality, so having the color brighten as the area expands shows that it’s not just more of the same. I’m annoyed with the gradient technically, I think it breaks the simplicity rule of flag design by making it a lot harder to draw the flag from memory or print it in a standard way. Oh well. SVG here.
A more abstract one with some similar pieces...
This is a pretty stylish flag, and I liked the thought process behind it. I must admit that when I first saw it I thought it looked like the sort of flag the villains would have though! Would it be possible to check out how it might look if the central star was blue? I feel like the middle bit instinctually represents ‘us’, and we want to be the good guys.
Sure!
Same energy as: