What’s in a name? An ode to the names and logos that preceded Procrasteroid

I’m an overthinker and a perfectionist. There, I said it.

The truth is, I care a lot about appearances and how my work comes across. After all, every project I put out is an extension of my personal brand. I can’t have sloppy work sullying my good name, right?

Here’s the problem with that mentality though: I throw a lot of perfectly good stuff away in the process. And I mean a lot.

I’m not just talking about game projects either, the very branding of this website has been in a state of constant revision for the best part of 2 years.

In fact, Procrasteroid.com is the third domain I’ve purchased in the past year, and the only one that’ll be making a public debut. Before it came a number of perfectly acceptable names, logos, and identities that didn’t stand up to my constant nit-picking and over-analysing.

Rather than let all those ideas go to waste, I thought I’d share them here in a blog post, a testament to the names and logos that could have been.

While we’re at it, I’ll give a little history to each name, sharing the story of how it came about and revealing how far it got into its life before it was retired to the archives.

So without further ado, in chronological order, let’s take a trip down the memory lane of conceptual branding.

Wild Goat Games: 2018 – 2020

This truly was the original. Back in 2018 I was a plucky 27-year-old with an ambition to learn about game development and publish my experiences online.

I struggled for a while to come up with a name, when someone suggested something relating to goats and I jokingly said “Wild Goat Games” as a silly example. As soon as I heard it out loud, I knew that I was onto something fun.

After some playing around with logos and fonts, the original and most prevalent Wild Goat Games branding was born.

Original Wild Goat Games logo

Created: Summer 2018
Lifespan: 2 years

At the time I loved this design. It was edgy, had personality, and stood out from the crowd.

The downside was that, thanks to my limited experience with design software, it was neither a vector graphic or original work.

The font was a random free font that I was unlikely to have the rights to use. Worst of all, the goat iconography was ripped off a brilliant piece of artwork, to which I applied a solid black overlay and made some minor tweaks to make it original.

While many people said they liked this branding, deep down I knew that it wasn’t right to use something where I’d cut corners.

So, around early 2020, I made the decision to create a new logo for Wild Goat Games.

Wild Goat Games redesign phase 1

So this one started out as a sketch in my notebook, back in July 2020. I was going for something that felt a little more tribal.

The idea was that the “wild” element of the name would allude to imagery of the occult, hence the random circle between the horns. In my mind, that was spooky and felt vaguely supernatural.

Look at that sketch! Looks cool, right?

Well, here’s how it turned out when I converted it into a vector graphic, around 3 months later.

Wild Goat Games logo V2: Voodoo vibes

Created: Early September 2020
Lifespan: Approximately 3 weeks

As much as I liked this concept on paper, once I made it as a vector and stuck it on my website, it felt soulless. Something just didn’t feel right.

It also didn’t help that the font I was ripping off in my illustration was absolutely a licensed font that I didn’t want to have to buy, if I were to go ahead with this design.

So, within the space of about 2 weeks, back to the drawing board I went!

Wild Goat Games redesign phase 2

For this design, I decided to lean harder into the aforementioned occult angle.

The plan was to take the goat illustration, which I was happy with, and surround it with crazy tentacle stuff to bring it to life a bit.

A rough sketch, but you can see where I was going. Here’s how this idea turned out.

Wild Goat Games logo V3: Tentacular spectacular

Created: Late September 2020
Lifespan: Approximately 3 weeks

As you can see from the image above, the “tentacles” came across more like reeds, and I was getting strong Lion King or beer brand vibes from the entire thing.

Whatever this was, it wasn’t working.

So once again, I returned to the drawing board, growing increasingly frustrated with the hole I was digging myself into.

Wild Goat Games redesign phase 3

At this point, I was trying anything.

I had this idea to take the “goat + tentacles” theme and continue to run with it further, changing things up to a side-profile view for the icon.

So I took to the internet, looking for inspiration.

I wanted something that would fit into a circle and look cool.

Following this approach, here’s where I landed with my initial sketch:

I then went into the design process and fell down the “golden ratio” rabbit hole, spending a good couple of weeks trying to make this concept work with those damn circles.

Here’s how it ended up.

Wild Goat Games logo V4: Definitely not Mortal Kombat

Created: Mid October 2020
Lifespan: Approximately 2 weeks

Needless to say, this was less “golden ratio” and more “golden shower”. I didn’t even bother to carry on with this idea at this point.

I returned once again, in what felt like logo design groundhog day, to my sketchbook.

Wild Goat Games redesign phase 4

Scroll back up to “redesign phase 3” for a second, see that image on my computer screen? The Cthulhu-looking thing?

That’s what I wanted. That’s the energy I was after.

So I decided to hit my sketch book, trying to imagine what that would look like if it were crossed with a goat.

After a few sketches, I landed on this:

Is it weird and confusing? Yes, of course.

But is it cool? In my opinion, absolutely.

I decided to run with this concept and bring it to life in my design software. Fast forward a couple of weeks and here’s where I landed.

Wild Goat Games logo V5: Goathulhu?

Created: Mid-November 2020
Lifespan: Approximately 3 weeks (noticing a trend yet?)

I feel like this design was something of an homage to the old Bullfrog logo design.

It was my first time experimenting with a more vertical logo design, and I liked it. I spent a tonne of time testing this design out and looking at it in different contexts.

I truly thought I was onto a winner. But, after about 3 weeks of thinking I was done at last, I started to feel like something was off.

It didn’t feel professional, something felt like it lacked impact. I liked the overall design but I wanted to refresh it to be bolder, punchier.

Wild Goat Games redesign phase 5

So, I spent some time experimenting to achieve exactly that. In fact, I sat down and came up with 15 concepts that played with this idea.

Here’s a carousel gallery, with all of the iterations I came up with:

I loved these ideas, some more than others.

By the time I reached the last concept, I was already sold and it was simply a case of making a few final tweaks.

Final Wild Goat Games logo: The big one!

Created: December 2020
Lifespan: 1 year

Look at it.

The culmination of about 6 months of continuous iteration and reworking of ideas.

I was obsessed and completely enamoured with my final design.

For a year, this was the look. I even released a game under this branding.

I thought it was done, finally over, I’d at last reached peace. Until one afternoon, that familiar urge to change something crept back into my subconscious.

Here’s the deal: Over time, I started to feel like the name “Wild Goat Games” had too much personality and was a bit too gimmicky sounding. I often daydreamed about switching to something a bit more neutral, a blank canvas that would let my games speak for themselves.

I began a process of imagining names that fit this brief, until suddenly one hit me.

Mononym Games: Late 2021 – Early 2022

Do you ever hear a word or phrase and just think, “band name”. Well, that’s sort of what happened to me with Mononym Games.

I was getting on with work one day when, out of nowhere, I thought of the word “Mononym”.

It sounds cool and it has “mono” in it, which relates to my solo development, and it’s almost a palindrome. Its definition is pretty much “a name consisting of only one word”, which I loved in terms of the allusion to identity and individualism, something that is important to me with my game design initiatives.

Needless to say, I immediately started messing around with ideas.

Mononym games logo early concept

Here’s a rough design I came up with, within about 5 minutes of having the idea for the name.

The symbol is random and nonsensical, as is the backwards N. But I liked it, so I ran with it.

Step 1 was to come up with a design for the icon.

Mononym games icon design process

My first inspiration for a symbol was around the idea of “self”.

After all, a mononym is a form of personal branding, it’s an identity.

After some googling, I discovered the Jungian concept of the ego and self. Here’s what the simplest visualisation of the concept looks like:

The ideas is that the central dot represents the Ego, whereas the Self can be said to consist of the whole with the centred dot.

A more complicated version of this concept looks like this:

I liked the imagery of these diagrams and wanted to play with the shapes, to make something that represented a sense of identity. Super deep and edgy, I know.

It was at this point that I came across Campbell’s theory of The Hero’s Journey, or “Monomyth”. The Hero’s Journey is, essentially, a model for the archetypal story structure, based on the legends of Greek mythology. Here’s what it looks like:

I won’t go into detail about the theory behind the Monomyth, truthfully I’m not sure I would be able to even if I wanted to.

But I took the imagery associated with it, combined it with the diagrams for Jung’s theory of the self, and combined them to make my own symbol.

A symbol that absolutely doesn’t just look like a solar system.

From here, it was simply a case of putting it all together.

Mononym Games logo: The final product

Created: October 2021
Lifespan: Approximately 3 months

As a piece of design, I loved it.

I loved the story that the icon told, even if it didn’t really mean anything to others, it meant something to me.

In fact, I liked this design so much, that I bought a domain name and created social media accounts with this name.

Fast forward a few months, and I suddenly found myself having doubts once again:

• I didn’t want to mention “games” in the title. It felt like I was pretending to be some big studio and, in reality, I wanted to make artwork and game music too.
• It just all felt a bit random and overdone. A concept that was so abstract, it meant nothing to anyone.
• Some of the design elements, like the backwards N, were just unnecessary.

I started to feel like I’d prefer to just pick a username and use it in conjunction with my own name.

And so, with that as my new north star, I entered the final phase of this lengthy branding process.

Searching for a Name: January – February 2022

So, I started the process of imagining one-word names.

I was looking for something that spoke to my personal challenge, as this long-winded recollection undoubtedly shows, of being indecisive, obsessive, and easily distracted by the next project idea.

I took the time to sit and brainstorm one-word usernames that captured this concept or, in some cases, just sounded cool. Here’s a snapshot of these ideas:

• @neverdone
• @procrasteroid
• @deepnull
• @monoloid
• @monotoid
• @obstructoid
• @doubtloop
• @v100
• @hundrededits
• @randomloop
• @irkward
• @balkward
• @orkward
• @slowstart
• @overthonk
• @wintrovert
• @hypnautical
• @h8bit
• @doubtware
• @worryware
• @awkware
• @distractware
• @tangentware
• @dstrctd
• @dstrctv

All of them alluded in some way to the idea that I change my mind a lot, and am unhappy with a lot of my projects.

From these ideas, I started checking what Twitter handles were available.

I picked two of the names that I liked, and turned them into fully-fledged logo concepts.

Concept #1: Neverdone

Created: January 2022
Lifespan: Approximately 2 days

The idea with this name is that, as an indecisive perfectionist, I am never truly done.

I absolutely adored the integration of the mobius strip into the wordmark, to give the sense of an infinite loop.

Sadly though, this username was taken across most platforms. So I revisited a second idea.

Concept #2: Doubtloop

Created: January 2022
Lifespan: Half a day

In this case, the idea was more about the continuous cycle of doubt and second-guessing my own work, which had led to my current predicament.

I wanted to salvage the infinity aspect of the previous concept, along with trying to make it feel more game related.

In the end, I just wasn’t feeling it. It felt too forced again.

I decided to let things simmer for a bit until, suddenly, a name caught me out of nowhere.

Distracture: Early 2022 – Present

I settled on the name Distracture for a few reasons:

• It communicates my tendency to get distracted easily and procrastinate
• It incorporates elements of other terms, like fracture
• It’s interesting to say, it almost sounds like a word (in fact, it actually is a Latin word, it turns out)
• Most importantly of all, it was available across all platforms as a username

Distracture logo design phase 1

My first concept for the Distracture logo played on the idea of a random path, zig-zagging from idea to idea.

Rather than spend ages talking you through the process, I’ll simply show you where this line of thinking ended up.

Distracture logo V1: Well, it’s something

Created: February 2022
Lifespan: Approximately 3 weeks

There were actually a total of three versions of this logo. First, there was the vertical version you see above.

Then, there was a horizontal version.

And finally, there was a horizontal version that included a personal strapline: “Games, art & sounds by Harry Elwell”.

I liked the direction this was going in, but I felt like I could give it just a hint more personality and relevancy to gaming.

Distracture logo design phase 2

This was when, late one night, I awoke suddenly with a logo concept hazily coming to fruition in my still-half-asleep mind.

At that time, I pulled out my phone and quickly doodled the idea before I would forget it.

Here is what I drew, at around 3am that morning:

The idea is that it’s a game controller with an eye. That’s it.

Clean, simple, communicated the theme of games and the theme of distracted attention.

I then set to creating a polished icon in this style.

Look how cute he is! I shifted the eye to look to one side, to further communicate the idea of distraction.

Then it was just a case of adding the extra bells and whistles, including the all-important strapline.

Final Distracture logo: The finished product

Created: March 2022
Lifespan: 3 months

I opted for something bold for the main name, and something personal and handwritten for the strapline.

At the time, I loved it. In fact, when I originally wrote this article, I was doing so assuming that this was my endgame logo.

I even closed the article with the line, “Now, let’s see how long that feeling lasts.”

Well, lo and behold, here we are with another name and another set of logos!

Procrasteroid: Summer 2022 – Present

My biggest gripe with the previous name, Distracture, was that it didn’t communicate anything right off the bat. I also had to admit to myself that it didn’t bring me a sense of joy to say it out loud. I couldn’t imagine myself saying it to someone in the pub, for example.

For that reason, my self-doubt demons took hold once again and back to the drawing board I went. Specifically, back to my earlier list of name concepts I went.

One in particular stood out: Procrasteroid. Procrastination + Asteroid = the Procrasteroid.

So, why did I settle on Procrasteroid? A few reasons:

• It does a much better job of communicating my tendency to get distracted easily and procrastinate (see this article for evidence, haha…)
• It tells a story, you can immediately imagine an asteroid flying somewhat aimlessly through space, the metaphor is much clearer
• It’s fun to say, I love wordplay and it brings a welcome amount of fun
• Not only was available across all platforms as a username, it also returns absolutely ZERO content when you search it on Google 🙌

So that’s the idea. It’s me, the Procrasteroid, the procrastination asteroid. Gliding aimlessly through space, in seemingly random directions, but always in orbit of something bigger.

Get it? I thought it was fun. Now I just needed a logo to bring it home.

Procrasteroid logo design phase 1

I came up with this whilst locked in a room and sick with Covid-19. The idea was that I could reuse the eyeball controller icon that I’d designed previously and still loved, simply turning it into the “Procrasteroid” itself.

Here’s how that concept turned out…

Procrasteroid logo V1: Meteor-lite

Created: June 2022
Lifespan: Approximately 3 months

I stuck with this for a little while, but ultimately decided something still wasn’t right.

Procrasteroid logo design phase 2

The latest, and hopefully final, concept for my logo starting with an idea that came to mind out of nowhere, which I hastily rushed to get down on a nearby whiteboard:

The idea is that the wire from the controller is the orbit path of the asteroid. At this stage, I intended to create a full version with a wordmark, and a condensed icon version.

I then set about mocking these up in more detail, first the full-width wordmark with a custom font:

After this I moved onto the icon, testing out a few concepts:

And for good measure, here are a few more example sketches:

So after all that, where did we land?

Procrasteroid logo V2: Is that toothpaste?

Created: October 2022
Lifespan: Approximately 1 month

While I liked this at first, I felt like something wasn’t right and it was too bottom heavy. It was at that point where I simplified it all and went for something more lightweight.

Procrasteroid logo design phase 3

I decided to take one more stab at this concept, dialling it back to the more lightweight concept I’d originally sketched. I also started playing with negative space instead of relying on outlines, which I didn’t love in my previous design.

I already felt better about this design. Something felt more “legit”, more official. Like a proper clean logo with a clear concept that didn’t try too hard to smash things together.

After literal years of back-and-forth, it was finally time to wrap this up into a finished design.

Procrasteroid logo V3: The finished product, really!

Created: November 2022
Lifespan: January 2022

I won’t lie, I really loved this, but I randomly got a new idea and decided to roll with it.

So, without further ado, here is where we ended up.

Final Procrasteroid logo: Okay, really, this is it for now.

Created: January 2023
Lifespan: Still in use! 🏆

I love it.

So much so, that I smashed an enlarged version of it onto the homepage, complete with the tagline I loved from earlier concepts.

Now, let’s all hope and pray that I can leave logos alone for a while, and at last focus on creating games.