Lurching Towards A Logo

A couple of months ago, I launched a new Substack newsletter exclusively for my fiction. I decided to call it As The Word Churns since I like to do the funny stuff. I needed a logo for it.

My first idea (above left) was a bubbling cauldron sitting on a pencil fire. Lots of noxious bubbles, and a second pencil to stir the pot. Naturally you’re saying to yourself: What a terrible color scheme!!— whatever possessed you??

I had previously designed a “sleeping baby” logo for a newsletter about my in-progress children’s book. I guess I was on auto-pilot. I decided to use the same colors for the new logo.

Did I quickly realize brown and orange didn’t work for a bubbling cauldron? No. But I was smart enough to see the cauldron had way too much detail. I reduced the number of bubbles, then I got rid of the “stir pencil.”

Then my eyes (and maybe my nose) were opened: a bubbling cauldron should have sickly colors, right? How about purple and green? I decided to use the familiar No. 2 pencil colors for my “fire.”

At this point, I finally asked myself a question I should have asked at the beginning: Where’s this logo going to appear, and how big will it display? (OK, that’s two questions.)

The answers: Substack logos appear on your newsletter homepage— and they’re very small, as you can see in this screenshot:

Screenshot

" data-image-title="Screenshot" data-orig-file="https://markarmstrongillustration.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/churnspage.4substack.jpg" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"Screenshot","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"Screenshot","orientation":"1"}" width="600" data-medium-file="https://markarmstrongillustration.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/churnspage.4substack.jpg?w=300" loading="lazy" data-permalink="https://markarmstrongillustration.com/2025/10/17/lurching-towards-a-logo/screenshot-2/" alt="Screenshot showing how small a logo displays on a Substack newsletter home page" height="364" class="size-large wp-image-19680" data-large-file="https://markarmstrongillustration.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/churnspage.4substack.jpg?w=600" />

So it was time to simplify the logo even more. I also chose a darker purple for the cauldron, and a single color for the pencil.

I decided the purple was too dark.