Earlier this year I wrote a bit about setting up a Mastodon server. I stuck to the technical side in that post but, in addition to that, there was the branding of the server (and a second server that spun off of it) so I figured I’d write that up here.
Shocking no one, I’m sure, I wanted something vintage-looking for the mastodon.hockey logo when I first fired it up using a Digital Ocean droplet. And since all of my hockey-related web properties use a pair of crossed sticks, I decided to use that design element, too. With that decided, the logo would be a profile view of a mastodon over a set of sticks, using “vintage white” and “O6 Web Properties blue.”
The idea was that it could be used in white on blue when I could control the background and in blue (preferably on vintage white, but not required) for other cases, like as the favicon.
By the time I decided that mastodon.hockey wasn’t just an experiment, I had realized that my quickly-rendered mastodon looked kind of like a buffalo, especially in those colors, which were close enough to the Buffalo Sabres’ to cause some cognitive dissonance.
When I re-launched the instance, I took the opportunity to re-brand. I still liked the basic idea but I switched to a head-on angle of the mastodon and switched the colors to grey and off-white (similar to what the Los Angeles Rams call “bone”).
Shortly after updating the instance, I spun up a new one at FantasyHockey.Social so that the FantasyHockeySim.com-related bot accounts wouldn’t be so loud at mastodon.hockey. For that instance, I re-purposed an old logo concept for FHS itself.
