by Farah 'Fairy' Mahdzan (22 Jan 2006)

When I secured the short and sweet domain name MyIndo.com to rebrand fairy.mahdzan.com, I wanted to have a new website logo in lieu of the new URL. I instinctively appointed this task of designing MyIndo.com's logo to Ryan Wijaya.

"How do you feel about using cartoon characters?" asked Ryan with immense seriousness.

"Would love it!" I approved happily.

And off the young graphic designer set to work. I gave him total freedom to decide on the logo elements. His turnaround time was insanely quick, something like less than a day. He came back to me with this monstrosity:

myindo.com logo: prototype #1

"Ryan! Apaan nihhh...!" I cried.

"It's your logo lah. Don't you like it? I used one of your pictures to make that outline of you," said Ryan innocently.

"But I don't want my logo to have my face in it...," I lamented. "Narcissistic!"

Perhaps I didn't make myself clear to the boy what I had wanted. I tried again.

"Myindo.com's logo has to represent the feel and mood of my writings, fun and light-hearted," I further elaborated. "It would also have to represent Indonesia-Malaysia in some minimalistic way."

Ryan got back behind his canvas and then emailed me this second sample:

myindo.com logo: prototype #2

While the logo was a vast improvement from the first one, I still had some issues with it. The cartoons were so... orange.. and BLUE! Although I liked the way their shapes came together, the colors were so garish and strongly reminded me of mouldy blue cheese and badly colored kindergarten drawings.

"Ryan, please deh, the colors...!" I started to say. Ryan responded by sending me peals of laughter in the shape of rolling-on-the-floor-laughing icons via Yahoo Messenger. I sighed.

Ok, the cartoons were great, but somehow they didn't look representative enough of Malaysia and Indonesia.

"How about we incorporate a map of the region somewhere in the logo," I suggested rather foolishly, clearly stumped for good ideas.

Ryan obliged and sent me:

myindo.com logo: prototype #3

Oh boy.

I was ready to shoot myself in the foot. Ops. Wait a minute. I had already done that.

"This looks weird!" I groaned. "Everything is just so wrong!" Ryan cried for an hour at my remarks and I had beg his forgiveness to appease his soul. He also made me promise to send him Lat books.

Finally, after a couple of modifications and simple-minded thinking, we finally decided to use the logo that you now so fondly associate with MyIndo.com.

May we present the meanings behind our logo as part of your trivia experience here at MyIndo.com:

Contrary to popular belief, "Bobo" is not a metaphorical representation of my supposed Indonesian boyfriend. Haha.

Relevant links:

Fairy Mahdzan on Wikipedia.com

MyIndo.com Recognized by Indonesian Embassy