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Interview with Aśka, designer of Wikileaks "hourglass" logo

Xeni Jardin at 5:09 pm Thu, Mar 7, 2013

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Who designed the WikiLeaks logo? According to this Metahaven interview, a designer named Aśka. She created the WikiLeaks hourglass in 2006, and her story is most interesting.

MH: How did the idea for the hourglass emerge?

A: I made the logo in 2006, so it’s hard for me to remember what I was thinking about at the time I made it. I’m sure it would have been a completely intuitive response to the brief. I can see from my sketches that it was pretty much one of the first things that came to my mind. I was very interested in the idea of transformation that Julian’s website was aiming to achieve. Changing the world may seem like a romantic notion, but it’s also exactly what needs to happen for each new generation to supersede the old. So I guess the hourglass is exactly that—a transformation in time. And the best thing about it is that once the last drop falls, you can turn it around and start again.

Boing Boing editor/partner and tech culture journalist Xeni Jardin hosts and produces Boing Boing's in-flight TV channel on Virgin America airlines (#10 on the dial), and writes about living with breast cancer. Diagnosed in 2011. @xeni on Twitter. email: xeni@boingboing.net.

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