Dear friends,
This week, a graphic design student of mine reached out to share an article about logo design and curious facts behind certain well known logos. I had stumbled upon these sort of articles many times before but I was curious to hear what caught her attention. She mentioned that some of the logos (for example the first in the article) were known to her but she had never seen the hidden elements of the design and that once she saw it, she could get the idea and the whole point of the logo - something clicked in her mind about it. Thanks to her enthusiasm and her realizations, I felt very inspired and during the conversation, I realized something about logo design that I had never thought of: the hidden power of symbols to merge multiple dimensions into one… which was the seed of this rune.
We live in the beautiful illusion of duality: even though things appear separate here, in essence, they are not.
In order to live peacefully with one another and closer to a shared universal truth, we humans have developed tools that help us see beyond dualism and reconnect to the true nature of existence.
We won't have the time to go through all of the existing practices (myths, meditations, arts, tales, embodiment practices, prayers, symbols, etc.) but I’ll try to formulate the principle behind all of them according to the intuition I got after my conversation with the student: such practices allow us to embrace paradox, turn conflict into understanding, integrate trauma through healing and see dualities as oneness.
I’ll focus on the power of symbols and specifically look at a practice very close to me which is logo design.
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A few aspects emerged in me about the non-dualistic power of symbols (and logos). One is the fact that a symbol cannot refer to itself otherwise it wouldn't be a symbol: a symbol needs to indicate something else and become its embodiment: one thing with it. This quality is in itself an expression of non-dualism.
Symbols bring together under one form, elements or layers that are not necessarily contiguous to one another, in their natural state. In other words, the semiotic elements that constitute a symbol are distinguishable and therefore separable, but within the context of the symbol they become one.
To show this in practical terms I’ll use the example of a logo I designed a few years ago for a publishing company called Eminent Productions promoting books and music on spirituality, contemplation, ecology and personal development.
The following abstract shape is Eminent Production's logo icon:
It unites within itself three other elements:
Within Eminent Productions, the tree represents the connection with nature, the book represents knowledge and the juggler represents the developmental path to awaken a person's talents and awareness (as well as being a reference to tarot card number 1). As mentioned above, these three constitutive elements of the symbol do not belong to the same domain but here they cohabit in the same space and entity becoming one thing within the Eminent Production's logo.
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While looking for a principle behind all this, I remembered something I thought of a while ago about the way we understand things:In order to understand the infinite parts of the world we gather them into wholes (perceivable units or patterns) that are comprehensible to us. These constitute our cognitive maps. When we intersect two or more of such maps we may (or may not) see connections between them: that’s what we call understanding.
Understanding arises in the convergence of osculatory points across multiple patterns/maps.
