Yes and no.
Satoshi did design a rudimentary bitcoin logo at first. Remember that back then it was called BitCoin, so BC made sense.
And then 11 years ago this week, an unknown artist created one of the best brand images of all-time and released it for free on a forum. To whoever you are, big kudos in creating one of the most iconic brand logos of all time and just like Satoshi we don’t know who created it. The rest is history.
The History and Symbolism Behind Bitcoin’s Logo
“As with almost every aspect of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto created a rudimentary logo in the protean days of the decentralized currency and the community iterated on it until this one stuck.”
Read the article:
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/the-history-and-symbolism-behind-bitcoins-logo
Why the Tilt?
There’s a curious reason for it.
Now, for the question that most new people probably ask: Why is the “B” tilted to the right? Well, there’s an explanation for that, too, and rather than butcher it, here it is straight from Wilson’s keyboard:
“14° came about by adding an infinite number of B’s together by dividing the previous value by 10. 12.5 + 1.25 + 0.125 + 0.0125 + 0.00125 + 0.000125 + 0.0000125 + 0.00000125 + 0.000000125 + 0.0000000125 + 0.00000000125 + 0.000000000125 … This comes to about 13.888 repeating. When using a drawing program that rounds the rotation angle to the closest full percent, the angle becomes 14°. The angle represents the blockchain progressing into the future forever.”
Frankly it’s a way to say with too many words that it looks like it’s moving to the future, and in Western cultures where we read and write from left to right the vector of progress is to the right.
Here’s the Bitcoin Talk thread about the logo. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=64.0
The Font, Orange, the Lines, the Design Choices
Every aspect of the Bitcoin logo has mathematical rationale behind it; every corner was architected as much for practicality and form as it was for symbology and aesthetics.
These rationale are painstakingly documented (as well as the specific instructions on how to make a perfect BTC logo from scratch) in this Medium post. The author, Phil Wilson, had helped design both the second logo that Satoshi introduced in February 2010 and the orange one that we know today.
The coin was colored orange for a practical as well as aesthetic purpose. In the words of Wilson, it had to be a color that could be printed/replicated “on both websites and print media” and one that would “stand out against all [other currency/payment options].”
The circle was chosen because, well, a coin makes sense — and a circle is “warm and friendly” and “continuous, endless, forever — just like Bitcoin.”
The trebuchet font that’s used in the logo was inspired by the trebuchet catapult which was a favorite weapon of Wilson’s in the “Age of Empires” computer game. By using the vertical strokes from the dollar sign in the Bitcoin design, Wilson wanted to give the impression that “those lines are not actually from the Bitcoin symbol, but from the $ symbol that’s been ‘Stamped’ into the ground by Bitcoin” — an indication of Bitcoin’s monetary dominance.
And, finally, the logo for the internet’s native currency wouldn’t be complete without a reference to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. In the logo, the orange circle is scaled to 525 percent to give it a precise diameter. Why is that? Naturally, because “525% is 12.5 x 42,” according to Wilson; in other words, it is one-eigth of 100 times 42, which, according to the book, is the secret to the universe.
And Now Absolut Bitcoin is Reinventing the Logo
I know it sounds narcissistic to say this but that’s how you write a mission statement for a project. Bitcoin is already a household name, sure. Misunderstood still, but people have heard of it, even talking about it with derision. Also, many people call every cryptocurrency out there as ‘a bitcoin.’ Things will change, we’re still early.
Anyway, this project is trying to come up with iconic ads that will show various concepts surrounding bitcoin, such as the timechain, the whitepaper, etc.
Who knows? Maybe it’ll stick. Maybe not.
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