(or is it?)

Graphic design. Fonts. Colour. Margins. As a young teenager they held a strange fascination for me. On reflection, graphic design is a job that would have suited me well. However, as is so often the case, life took me down a different road and any fond ambitions I had of kerning words at midnight, moving logos three mm to the right then back again, or deciding which curly apostrophe was the right one for a Sunday remained a distant dream.

The fork in my career path did not stop me doodling and designing on every available surface for the next half century, so creating the logo for this new site should really have been a piece of cake, right? Ha! If only.

I wanted it to look like nothing very much had happened. Some lettering, a circle, a couple of colours. The kind of mark a person who knew what they were doing might rough out on a napkin in the time it takes to drink a coffee. A casual gesture that wears its endeavours lightly despite it having taken me three weeks to perfect.

n fact it took a little over two months, on and off. Several hundred attempts. Maybe more. I lost count somewhere around the part where I was choosing between two shades of blue (or should it really be teal?) that are, I now realise, indistinguishable. I have spent my working life dealing with colour in one way or another and I still managed to lose four days to that decision. OK, I exaggerate. But it was a disproportionate amount of time.

The brief was straightforward and therein lay the problem. I wanted it to look hand-crafted, obviously. But there's hand-crafted and hand-crafted. Faux weathered surfboard shop vibe was not what I was looking for. Nor were faded beach cafe pastels or any of the liveries coffee shops get conscripted into when someone goes mad with a faux typewriter font and some hessian sacking. The corridor between obviously machine-made and obviously trying-to-look-beachy is narrower than you might imagine.

Fonts. Variations on fonts. Size. Variations on size. To capitalise or not to capitalise? That is the question. What about the memory I have largely repressed of a week wrestling with a circle that was altogether the wrong size? I hope I never have to revisit it.

Should I use a clear .png file with no background? Or a solid background? And if there is a background is it too obvious to make it the setting sun? I have a folder that is a shrine to my indecision, with files called FINAL, followed by FINAL 2!!!, followed by !!!LastFinal v3 (this one).

What I have at the end of all this is a circle, two shades of blue, one word in a font that vaguely resembles something that might have been made with a brush and one word in a thick hand-cut sans that might, if you half close your eyes, have been made with a letterpress. There is also a square version with just the A, because all good websites need a favicon. Total visible labour: roughly five seconds of looking. Total actual labour: an embarrassment. Best we don't go there.

And don't we all know that that is the truth about simplicity? Margaret Calvert, a British typographer and graphic designer, spent years on the British road sign system, and the genius of it is that you have probably never noticed. Effective design looks easy. But you'd better believe it took a great deal of time to look that way.

I am pleased with the result. Or as pleased as I can be. There is also an ongoing sense of 'what if?' Why did it take me several decades to realise my instinct as a 15 year old to pursue graphic design was the right one? Perhaps it is no surprise that the same person who once spent a week in December designing a festive wrapping paper/ribbon colour scheme would, decades later, lose four days to a particular shade of blue.

What I wanted was something that looked as though it had arrived without effort. It's one of life's frustrations that that is the most laborious thing in the world to fake.