I've tried a few more fonts, again propelled by Korivak's excellent suggestions.

I couldn't quite bring myself to doing Rockwell. Sure, it's a very nice font - but it still says "old-fashioned" and "type-writer-esque" to me. Sorry, Rockwell. Also, an attempt at Bauhaus fell rather flat. I like the chunky fonts but that became just a little too chubby... plus I couldn't find a way to join those pesky 'C'/'m' combatants peacefully together. Ugh. Next, please?

Font: Gill Sans MT; normal to the left and Condensed to the right. This font offered an interesting opportunity with its' lovely wide 'C', as you can see. I don't think it took too well to condensation though since that squeezed the 'C' too much I feel. The Condensed proper to the right has a different 'C' and a quite different 'k', but the result is interesting still although I like the normal version better. The left-hand one of those is actually "de-condensed", but I think this produced a too fat 'C' arc again. If one of these are promising, I suppose I could re-sculpt the 'C' arc to improve on the artefacts.

Font: Century Gothic Bold. Also a very interesting font to work with! I made the 'm' "punch through" the gap in that wonderfully wide 'C' which is good fun I think. Note the harmony between the remains of the 'm' stem and the upper arm of the 'k'. To make it work, I lifted the 'C' off the ground a little which is also interesting.

As an afterthought, I added the ones above which use a stroke to separate the parts instead of removing anything. That works too I feel, even if it is a simplistic solution. The renditions up there are made quick-and-dirty and for a proper result I should of course use a bit of path magic instead of a cheap white stroke, but they give an impression and that impression inspired me further to try with a touch of color and a closer approach of the C; I'm afraid that last bit got too intimate though and it'd need further work on those sharp bits.

Whew! Any further thoughts on this, anyone? I think I may prefer the last VAG Round 1:1 one but I think the last two fonts turned out very interesting too.

Interesting thoughts there.

The VAG Round ligatures don't have a line weight per se; they're just the font itself so I didn't really dare weighting them (nor do I know how to atm but I think I have an idea). I guess I could try something.

Anti-aliasing isn't really an issue, as I work with scalable vector graphics. I'll try to remember to present them smoothed. I think I just re-scaled these a bit which may have worked a little extra anti-aliasing into them.

The 'm' stem... ah, I suppose you do have to "kill your darlings" every now and then. I really loved the effect of the 'm' "punching through the gap" but I suppose it doesn't exactly aid legibility. Separating the 'm' and the 'C' with a stroke-like gap instead certainly works even if it's less exciting. One price to be paid is that you then really have to separate the 'k' parts from the 'm' as well which makes the design less daring overall. Also, the stroke didn't scale well but I guess we could use a thicker one and fix up any scaled rastered versions.

I've developed a feeling that the top of the 'C' wasn't really looking at the 'm' arcs at all, but past them and into the heart of the 'm'. That worked for me, but maybe I've spent too much time with these babies to have a fresh impression by now.

Were you thinking of a white stroke with the RGB on the VAG design itself, or on another?

How much condensation do you feel is right? None, 2:1, 4:3 or 1:1 (if you can get it)?

Not particularly "keyboard", but very beautiful.

I really like the first one, third row, from your first post DreymaR. Maybe the M could have finger nails. Looks a little like an arched hand anyway. Might need narrowing slightly.

I had another little inspiration, as seen below:

Very geometric, and that left-hand one has an optical illusion effect between the 'C' and 'm' creating the feeling of a wedge. Mostly for fun, this one, but interesting at least. I get the feeling that these ones have some interesting geometry but aren't going anywhere. And a text needs to move, even if it's only three letters long.

On a funny side note: At one point during all this, I was reminded of the good old (some would say it's bad and old I guess) CBM logo. That was pretty chunky for sure. Ahhh, the memories...  :)

Back on topic: One problem is that these chunky fonts and layouts don't scale too well downwards.

Update: I sat down with the aforementioned real graphic designer and I had a great time. Staying with the Century font family, the result is a full logo, courtesy of DreymaR and ARA Design:

Obviously, the slogan text is just a filler. As I remember it, we never quite agreed on a final slogan for the layout, but that may still happen.  ;)  I tried to think up a fun saying that used the letters C-m-k, but it's just for fun really.

I think the stripped-down version of it can be used as a plain ligature, probably keeping the middle dot in the 'C' but making it colorless:

(That may look silly on the site's gray background. The dot's brightness should be adjusted I guess.)

It's fun to work with a pro. She saw all sorts of things, and if something is imperfect it's probably of my making and not of hers. The design moved from a mere ligature to a real logo, but it's difficult to say whether we captured the right spirit and graphical goodness for the purpose as such things depend on so many subtle factors. So, what do you guys think?

I think it worked better with a capital 'C' and the ascender on the 'k', but the line of characters at the x-height also works.

Icons revisited:

I tried to make a few 'Cmk' icons, for PKL originally but they are the same type as on the top of this page. As you can see, fitting it all into a 12x12 matrix (since a 2-pixel border would be nice) is hard. I think I like the first one(s) best, but I'm not sure. It also depends on whether they're shown exactly or in an approximated palette (like they'll often be in the system tray). The narrow lines can get blurry then, which for instance hurts the third one more than the first one.

For the background color I used a web-safe deep blue (#000099). I kept them (mostly) monochromatic as the site one is, but they would be much nicer with a few tones on them. For now I'd just like to see what to proceed with. Also, using tones/tints might be tricky since that usually requires more pixels to work with - it's not really possible to make a smooth transition in 2 pixels!

I've had the first icon in my system trays for a few days now and I think it looks fine even when blurred a little.

Update: Went on to make the two 'chunky' ones to the right. I kinda like those. They're in web-optimised blues but the 'C' has antialiasing in contrast to the 'mk' which I feel looks interesting. To make them work at all, I had to forgo the 2-pixel border for a 1-pixel one; I think that's okay.

My current favourite:

Visually I'd prefer the next-to-last one over the last one, but on the other hand there it looks a bit more like an "O" or just a ring, than a "C".

But I'm happy with the default PKL "Co" icon, too.  And it's in line with all the other 2-letter locale icons in Windows.

I don't think there's an elegant way to get 3 letters in the small icon. One letter has to go (or maybe more ).

Heh. Why not just lop the 'ntinenal' off of Continental's logo while we're at it. :)

The reason I abandoned the next-to-last design somewhat, was that it looked too much like an 'O'. And even if the 'mk' are really small and a bit hard to read, I don't think that matters much after using the icon in my tray. The icon is meant for recognition, and I think it works for that.

Ho no, brown 'Co'...  :|

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