Seeing Stars

If you know me, you know trendiness isn’t exactly my thing. In fact I avoid trends if I can, because I so hate having to change everything up when what was in goes out. Especially when it comes to my logo.

When I went to make myself an invoice template in open office years ago, my logo wasn’t importing well. So I worked up new one that would work in plain text, with turquoise text and an orange asterisk in lieu of the supernova symbol I’d created. And to my surprise, I liked it better.

For one thing, the old symbol I’d made (which you can see in my favicon) looked a little like a circular saw blade. Plus my blog was becoming and more random, and asterisks are wild characters. (Just like me. Kidding. Kinda.) And of course I also liked that an asterisk/star could still vaguely reference a supernova, but that’s another story saga.

But now I’m seeing stars! Everywhere! Is the Asterisk the new Swoosh?

I’ve noticed them on banner ads for various companies out there on the web and wondered if their asterisks were as well intentioned as mine. But imagine my horror when I noticed yet another asterisk laden logo.. this one in blue and orange much like my blog.. for WALMART!?

When I designed this site layout and logo, I was purposely avoiding the look other sites and designs had at that time. I wanted to go simple and accessible.. something I could design once and forget about for years on end. Which is precisely what I’ve done. But now that freakin WALMART looks like me, I feel like I have to change to avoid looking like them. What would you do?

I’ll post Walmart’s logo here and will add in other asterisky logos as I find them. If you see any, drop me a note and I’ll add them here as well.

All of these logos are trademarked and / or copyrighted by their various owners, even if they are smelly old copycats. And if it turns out they ARE smelly old copycats with no originality whatsoever, I surely hope my logo doesn’t make me look like one of them.