GUID Socks: Closer to Reality

Waaaaaaay back in the day, I wrote about creating pairs socks tagged with globally unique identifiers (GUIDS) that would allow you to match up pairs of socks for neat, orderly folding. I remember being pretty enamored by the idea the time and started working on some spiffy second-generation designs where the GUID was translated into visually distinct patterns. I even had the beginnings of a promotional website made, to sell the world on the wonders of cryptographically secure socks.

Alas, that idea has yet to fully come to fruition, but as I was deleting some spam comments from older entries of this blog, I stumbled on this gem of a comment from someone going by the moniker 'Jon':

Hi, I got the very same idea and decided to google it and ended up here.

The question here is how to automatically feed the sock machine with new data for every pair. I need to check with a manufacturer if its possible. :)

Sometimes, the internet is pretty awesome.

Leaked Logos

Designing logos is difficult. Just ask the University of Waterloo: new logo designs that are allegedly part of a new marketing campaign have been getting lampooned with glee since they were leaked several weeks ago (on Facebook, of all places).

This brings me to the fancy circular thing at the top of this post. It is not a new UW iGEM logo; it's just me continuing to test sketching programs (the ring was drawn in Sketchbook, the lettering is from ArtRage). On the other hand, from what I've heard, the iGEM logo may soon look something like this. The reason for the logo change is due to complaints that the current use of the Waterloo lion dilutes the school's branding (more so than the new 'W' logo, apparently).

Even for a logo as simple as this test, there's a surprising number of considerations that I messed up. For one thing, it should be done with vector graphics so that the logo can actually scale, then there's all the technical errors with the perspective and shape of the gear and the DNA strands. Also, this logo is using some subtle shading that would probably get lost in most applications and having the text on the inside of the ring limits how small the logo can be made while remaining readable...

All in all, I'm really pretty glad I'm not working in graphics design.