One symbol to rule them all

Marketing
31

I was looking at the screen captures of the the launcher from the last blog post, and really clicked with the hexagon shape of its icon, that we can interpret as a honeycomb.

      

It is certainly not a coincidence (@scott could tell us) and I think it is a great idea because a beehive shares similarities with what the SAFE network aims at becoming. Which had me spend a few hours on one of my favorite topics, thinking about icons :smiley:

To elaborate a bit on the analogy:

To the beehive / network,

  • each cell / node is an essential supporting element of the whole structure.
  • A cell does not hang in the void, it is connected to others and others are connected to it. 

  • Take out enough of them, and the whole structure collapses.

  • Its role as a supporting element does enable to distinguish one from the other. What make it different is located inside the honeycomb, where user can safely store its personal data.

The inside of the honeycomb / user’s perspective,

  • This is a delimited space, isolated from the outside, auto sufficient,
  • From inside, one cannot see the whole beehive, and can at most get a partial perceptions that some things happen in his surrounding cells.

I am aware that this is not a perfect analogy, but at least it works for conveying a few ideas through an icon.
So there again I started to think about what a SAFE Network icon could look like, and here are some tests from oldest newest :

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In the last one:

  • The network is a 2D hexagon structure, centered on my honeycomb, which content is visible to me only.
  • I cannot “see” beyond the edges of the first surrounding cells.
  • My honeycomb is a 3D cube, carved inside the hexagon (from an isometric perspective).
  • I can see freely inside the cube, but the S from SAFE is sitting on the 3 transparent front faces, and protects its content.

It is still not good enough. I think the main difficulty is trying to convey 2 opposites ideas: the connectivity of the network and the privacy of my information: isolation and collaboration. Anyway that’s all I can think of at the moment, feel free to tell me how to improve this, or to propose something else entirely! And if MaidSafe already has in mind a precise design, ok tell me to stop :smile:

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