QED — Logo evolution

About the project

QED is my safe space, a closed discord gaming community that grows slowly but surely, it had quite a few logos across time (It's 8 years old now!) but it's only now that I feel I nailed the aesthetic.The name comes from the latin "Quod Erat Demostrandum" a phrase used to convey that a fact or situation demonstrates the truth of one's theory. I picked mainly because it sounded cool, but also because we like puzzles and brain teasers, so it made a little sense.Nowadays QED is just the name of the group, and the original meaning rarely comes up, but we did make a new slogan, "Perseverantia Vincit" meaning "Perseverance Prevails" It's just a fancy way of saying that we are a bunch of thickheads who won't give up and will keep at a problem until it's solved.With this group as my inspiration, I made a logo that we can identify with.

The evolution:

The first QED logos were, something, they lacked the experience I have cultivated in the last years and it shows, but they also help me understand the growth I had, and that makes me happy.

The first of them all:

You can easily tell I was a beginner when I designed that, I just put whatever I felt looked cool into the artboard and this came out, I don't know for how long I used it, but it sure was longer than it should have been.

A new look:

This was the first redesign I did, and I still love it, but it has quite a lot going on, and I wanted to explore a more minimal and discreet logo one that could communicate the same style with less, and so I got to work, distilling the essence of the logo into a final version.

The final result:

I feel like the final version is great and it's an excellent benchmark of just how much the style and my skills have evolved with time, it keeps in line with the eye + spark visuals that the first design had, while also improving on the style of the second version.