@drasnor said:
do you have another accompanied by Ivan or Spudz in the works?

I was rather fond of this experiment I did:

It also look pretty cool upside down. Just saying.

Blood and destruction shall be so in use,
And dreadful objects so familiar,
That mothers shall but smile when they behold
Their infants quartered with the hands of war,
All pity choked with custom of fell deeds,
And Ivan’s spirit, ranging for revenge,
With Spudz by his side come hot from hell,
Shall in these confines with a monarch’s voice
Cry “Havoc!” and let slip the dogs of war,
That this foul deed shall smell above the earth
With carrion men, groaning for burial.

Sooo... a logo change, eh? This is fine.

It seemed appropriate to announce this on May 24, the day Icrontic was wiped from the Internet back in 2003 before starting anew a week later on June 2. In its first few years of existence, old Icrontic had no fewer than 6 logos. Our current logo has had a really remarkable stretch by comparison - a full decade exactly!

The 2007 Icrontic logo debuted as the splintered communities of Short-Media and Icrontic were merged together exactly 4 years later, and it has a lot going for it. As its creator, I've obviously always been very (the most?) partial to it. But it also has several serious issues - some original sins, some accrued baggage:

1. Lopsided: It fits into many spaces awkwardly.
2. Tricolor: The hat adds two colors (white, orange) making it challenging to use in many contexts.
3. The Fedora: Meme-ified in 2012 to be synonymous with neckbeards & mysogyny. Oof.
4. Scaling: The hat becomes fuzzy at small size, and gets weird at jumbo size.
5. Wordmark: It has no good abbreviation (e.g. for a favicon). "IC" is common shorthand with no logo equivalent. The fedora alone looks all wrong.
6. Mascot conflict: By hatting the first 'i', full-illustration Ivan (a more recent innovation) and the logo cannot appear in the same graphic without it being weird.

What it does well is convey a tone and nice throwbacks to earlier eras of the site. The attitude & voice of Icrontic was conveyed in the past in many ways: irreverence, snappy (and nonsensical) catch phrases, Spudz' shades & panama hat, and the color scheme were all contributors. Even that little curve in the bottom of the 'T' has always stayed consistent over the years.

The fedora was trying to convey a bit of film noir; perhaps some comic book hero flavor. Unfortunately, every year since 2012 (the debut of the "m'lady" meme) has put another nail in that coffin. That dog don't hunt no more.

So what next?

If I've learned one thing, it's to never start fresh. You can iterate away the problems, but a clean slate also loses everything you've learned. Like well-seasoned cast iron, the flavor of Icrontic cannot be applied in one layer.

SOUND AUTOPLAYS: Every Icrontic logo & the big 2017 reveal!

You can thank @keto for the audio.

In this case, I chose to keep the logo font (Myriad Pro), down to the derpy dot over the lowercase 'i' that I artificially elongated just a smidge back in 2007. I went down a bunch of dead ends with the first 'i' until I conceded I was no typographer and it needed to mirror the other one. I pulled the 'c' in close, and knew I was onto something because we had the beginnings of an 'ic' wordmark.

Are the letters hugging? Are they leaning on their neighbors? Have they formed cliques? Why don't 'c' and 'r' like each other, anyway? It's like the letters are some kind of weird community...

That a new wordmark is mirrored on both ends of the logo was the cherry that made it too good to ignore: Icrontic had a new logo.

Throwbacks? Check. Tone? Check. Known problems solved? Check x6! While the 2007 logo will forever be remembered as the progenitor of Ivan (who is most assuredly sticking around), it's time to set it out to pasture.

Here's to another decade with the new logo. It's gonna look fresh as hell on new swag.

Stretchy fabric had bothered me previously as well, specifically not being very breathable, but I have recently discovered, after wearing basically the same kind of pants every day for the last 20 years, that it is possible to find slightly elastic (not really super stretchy - I find I like 1.5% elastic) pants for men these days, which are actually pretty comfy. I may finally be ditching my suspender's habit for pants that actually stay on my body all by themselves (something that, due to my body shape is very novel for me.) The pants Betsy is talking about are the Urban Classics men's pant with 2% spandex which I found to be almost as comfortable as pajama pants, but which look like stylish adult human pants. I still wear pajama pants for sitting around the house, but I ordered a couple more pairs of these Urban Classics also for to wear out of the house.