I have a new logo! The old one was apparently impossible to understand and I always hated about it that it wouldn’t look right without a baseline, it didn’t fit right inside a square and it wasn’t dynamic. So I gently disposed of it. So long!

I wanted a new symbol that would be more about me than the Cute Little Factory. I still brand myself personally and market myself as Andrea Austoni so it made perfect sense. Still, I wanted the new logo to have something to do with the Factory and also have an architectural quality to it because over the years I have come to accept and welcome architecture as the foundation (no pun intended) of my thought process.

A week of furious sketching ensued, during which I covered the pages of my notebook with various abstract A-shaped buildings, siedlungen, factories with smokestacks, blocks, cubes and facades:

Next I tried to carve a smokestack in the negative spaces of the A, without too much success:

Then came the A-shaped spaceships which are a lot of fun but also an overly abused concept:

Then came the weird/kooky sketches: A’s with hairdos, cogs (including one dangerously close to a Celtic cross – veeery creepy!), combs:

Bender-like faces and a poor A that had opened around a hitherto unknown hinge and started foaming goo across the page: that’s what I was looking for!

So now folks I present my new logo, here’s how it works:

I’m lovin’ it! I like to think of a letter A that suddenly bursts open and starts purring and churning away, emitting dark smoke in the unsuspecting atmosphere:
Identity. Openness. Creation.

Right now I’m working on a new business card and I’m telling you it’s a mess! The back will feature the image above and it’s fine (but not dandy), the front will have the usual contact info and I still can’t come up with a decent solution. Why is it so hard to put a couple of lines of text on a 9 cm x 5 cm piece of paper? Ahhh…(that’s a sigh)