Hey there,
Laurent’s here. A short one this week!
I’ll start with a boring precision: at
Volumetrics, Inc. (the company) we are building two
things: a spatial development environment called
Volumetrics, powered by an open-source Web
Components library called mrjs.
You already know the Volumetrics logo. Today, let’s talk about the mrjs one.
Why a logo?
But first, why do open-source frameworks need logos? Well, because they are often governed differently than the company that sponsors them. Being open-source, mrjs shouldn’t reuse elements from our trademarked logo.
More importantly, a community will gather around this project. A community that doesn’t necessarily interact with Volumetrics directly, or identify with its logo. mrjs needs to be its own entity. This is why a project like React has nothing to do with Facebook / Meta, brand-wise.
Here are some very well-known examples of huge open-source libraries with large communities. I’m pretty sure you can name them all!
The ideation
For mrjs, I knew we wanted to follow the brand attributes we laid out for the company. The three most important being honesty, wholesomeness, and timelessness.
I wanted something smart, timeless, elegant, but also something helpful and a bit quirky, which is a good reflection of who we are. There are quite some people who already read “mrjs” as “Mister JS” and we thought it was whimsical and fun. That led us to explore the idea of a bow tie. A convergence of two parts, forming a whole.
The typography
Regarding the logotype (the written part of the logo), you
would think it’s easy to just find the right typeface and write
mrjs and be done with it. Unfortunately, I
encountered an issue. See, in between the r and the
j is created a weird space, that I just couldn’t
unsee.
The solution was straightforward, though. By using small caps for the MR part, we get a natural separation of the two components MR and JS, and my whitespace problem was resolved!
Bonus points: by using Unicode sᴍᴀʟʟ ᴄᴀᴘs, we can write mrjs as ᴍʀjs in text, which looks cool. 👀
The final logo
Without further ado, here is the mrjs logo. You can visit the documentation website to get a feel of it in action!
There it is. I hope you like it! 😊
Video of the week
Anchoring is a key element to any spatial experience, it grounds virtual content in the real world, and allows developers to take full advantage of their users’ environment. Watch the YouTube demo of the various anchors we support in mrjs. You can also check out the live demo.
A final note: we would really appreciate it if you would star the repository on GitHub. It would tremendously help people discover mrjs, give the project more legitimacy, and hopefully even find new contributors.
Take care, and until next time
Laurent