The Original Makers’ Alliance Logo

I was doing some research for a rough timeline of the organization’s history to add to our wiki, when I found something kind of interesting in my archived mail:

This is the original hand-drawn version of our logo that was sent to our mailing list on December 20th, 2009 (I’d link to that, but the list was hosted elsewhere back then, and the posted archives are long gone). It was done by a then-member named Robert Miller (arch3angel). Here’s the bulk of his post’s text:

“I did a logo design with just pencil as the ideas came to me.  I scanned it so everyone can see it, if we like it I can begin to work on a Photoshop version.

It is a gear, with a light bulb in the center.  Inside the light bulb is a tree shaped circuit path.  The whole idea came from our internal gears turning as we thinking of ideas which sparked the light bulb.  The tree shaped circuit path is to symbolize our interest in all things technology, with the tree being that the roots and branches being all of us making creating “Makers Alliance” from the ground up.  I know sorta cheesy but felt right when the ideas were flowing :-)”

This was then followed up by the Photoshop version (which was posted as a link, and isn’t available any more), and an Illustrator re-work of that which we still use today: