Today I would like to dedicate this space to the design I did for the contest of the @curie community. The creative process, which led me to submit different achievements, is part of a single elaboration, made up of revisions, corrections and extensions that I believe deserve to be told a bit.

My landing on steemit is recent, I started to understand the elements that make up this social for a short time.
Time enough to establish that activities such as those carried out by communities like Curie are essential for this wonderful ecosystem.

Representing concepts such "meritocracy" and "discovery" do not fall under the canons of traditional design. Not really. This is why I took the opportunity, as a unique opportunity.

The canons that I imposed for this realization had to be:

• Meritocracy
• Community
• Joy

For this, I immediately put some good music, and started this project:
🎧 The right soundtrack for me was Tycho's "Specter", enjoy the listen, is highly recommended.

In the first phase I collected some ideas for the representation, and capture the concepts behind great logos. There are good examples around, such Joomla , MySpace , which has made their logo a powerful tool for communication. The result of this first approach was a simply symbol:

To which I added the element of the upvote.

However I was not satisfied with the resultant. Although the composition expressed valid concepts of community, as per my habit and experience, I began to connote inverse aspects to the primary concept, as an action of self-evaluation. This logo could have expressed the exact opposite: that is, concepts of centralization and "round table" effect.

So I started again to sketch other solutions:

But I was not satisfied with the result yet.
I drew on some design experiences that took place in the last period. In particular, the logo created for the "Scoop" product of Saggoss Inc. London, You can take a look here. In this case my client appreciated the concept of circular element, cellular, aggregation. So I thought about resuming these concepts, and rework them for Curie.

Personally I love the representations of organic elements through geometrical schemes, when this happens, You could obtain a result of very strong harmony.

The first solution obtained had a strongly geometric and irradiating appearance.

I was not satisfied yet.
I needed to give a more dynamic sense, that would expose energy and movement.
So I thought about giving a ray bending:

On this result I decided to stop. Adopting a curvature allowed to add notable elements, without altering the good perceptibility of the logo. The geometric arrangement and the orientation of the elements has returned a strong balance, guaranteed by the optical play of the weights.
Optical weights are actually unconscious perceptions, which are attributed to symbols and visual elements. These are very important, in reality they change a lot from culture to culture, in my case "as a Western culture" the values ​​returned are mainly three:

• The central part: or rather "the ratio" (read as latin word), the motive of all this energy.
• The right side, expresses friction, dynamic effort and descent. An energy negative necessary to get its positive. Concepts that go well with meritocracy, the effort of study and the achievement of knowledge.
• The left side, instead, expresses concepts such as ascent, ascent, positive energy and sustainer. Concepts that join with meritocracy, the existential becoming supported by effort, the reward.

All expressed in a continuous progress, as suggested by the good @SkippyZA almost to evoke the ancient art of oriental mandalas.
The points, in a community context, finally become people, energy, joy and life.

Well yes, joy finally. The very reason to exist for any community.
Despite the "venal" meanings that I feel to attribute to steemit, I feel I have found in Curie a community in search of an authentic values. Made of good contents, of people who celebrate life and human beings every day. Is this the same sense of modern "currency" in actual and future living?
Joy?

Absolutely yes.
They are.

Let's make it joyful:

Another point that led me to dwell on this solution was usability.
For a good brand to be effective, I make sure that this can be used in a creative and fun way without diminishing the essence, indeed, trying to understand how the essence of the logo can be enhanced and brought to new levels. This is why I created a series of ready-to-use graphic elements:

Last but not least, the Typography.
Being a brand built on absolute geometries, I wanted to keep geometric shapes even in the typography, but at the same time give a touch of personality. I have a good source for this goal, and it is the Emigre foundry. Their fonts are legendary, characterized by harmonious shapes and geometries and rich in personality, such as to sound like pop music for our eyes.

Ottomat Font - is property of Emigre, Inc Designed by Claudio Piccini

In my case, the choice fell on "Ottomat" font, designed by the excellent Claudio Piccinini. The package will be donated with license of use to the Curie team for any purpose. For those who want to deepen the vision of this talented designer and his personal elaboration of the Ottomat font there is a pleasant interview on the Planet Typography magazine:
http://www.planet-typography.com/news/designer/piccinini.html

Enjoy!