It is true that I have been known to stretch a metaphor long past its breaking point.  But it is also true that sometime my subconscious calls the shots and I’m not even aware of it till long after.  Such is the case, I think, with the logo I designed for MidLifeBloggers.

I designed it.  Yes, me, not a graphic designer.  I, who never has taken even a smidgen of a graphic design course.  But I was adamant, even when others who were professionals offered to do it.  I didn’t know what I wanted, so how could I tell them, I reasoned.  I had to muddle through myself and find out what I liked by seeing it and tweaking it and then retweaking it.  So I bought a $9.99 program at Staples (Logo Design Shop), installed it, and started playing.

When I was finished, I liked it.  I liked it a lot.  And then I started to think about the different elements that I had put into it, and why they actually made sense.
The geometrical shape in the center represents a tent.  When I think about MidLifeBloggers, how it started and where it is going, I think of The Red Tent.  A place where women gathered to support each other and to learn from each other and to just be with each other.  But at midlife, we are to varying degrees finished with the Red Tent, which is, after all, the Menstruation Tent.  I became fixated on an orange tent.  Why, I hadn’t even a clue.  It just had to be an Orange Tent.  The only orange tents I could find on Google were for camping (I think they’re rather popular in Himalayan trekking).  But then I found some sites that talked about the symbolism of colors, and I read on About.com:

“Orange is vibrant.  It’s a combination of red and yellow so it shares some common attributes with those colors.  It denotes energy, warmth, and the sun.  But orange has a bit less intensity or aggression than red, calmed by the cheerfulness of yellow….Orange represents the changing seasons so in that sense it is a color on the edge, the color of change between the heat of summer and the cool of winter.”

Of course: doesn’t that just sum up who we are and what we’re aiming for?  Suddenly my urge for orange made sense.

The orb in the center is all things that an orb can be: the sun, the earth, roundness, completeness, fullness. Call it what you will; see it as you want to.

And the turquoise lettering?  That too came about serendipitously.  It worked and then I saw that it worked because it evoked something larger and deeper than I anticipated.  The sky, the sun, the sea–the eternal.

So there you have it, a visual representation of  MidLifeBloggers.com where we are Making The Most of Midlife Together.