Coming up with a logo for a social anxiety platform
What does The Little Mermaid have to do with true self expression?
If taught in a sensitive, non-judgemental manner, singing could be a powerful social anxiety hack: we access repressed emotions, express hidden truths, and learn to be vulnerable — which is exactly what many individuals with social anxiety struggle with. So as part of my studies in User-Centred Design, I conceptualised a social anxiety platform with a step-by-step, CBT-based guide to prepare users for an in-person, therapeutic voice session. For detailed information on the research and design process, you can read my case study here. This article is going to be about the logo.
While I was deeply immersed in the project, I struggled to come up with a name, nevermind a logo for the project. But with some distance, Ariel popped into my mind. Didn’t the little mermaid trade her voice to be a human?
As a child I was obsessed. I watched the movie over and over, followed the series, listened to the audio cassette, and had to be Ariel on dress-up day at kindergarten — even though it was impossible to find a purple shell bikini for a six-year old. Thirty-odd years later, I didn’t remember all the details of the story, but the image of sea witch Ursula extracting Ariel’s beautiful singing voice and keeping it in a shell around her neck was still very clear. So I investigated a bit further: was there a link between The Little Mermaid and social anxiety — a mental illness that causes you to hide your true self because of a debilitating fear of judgement?
An online search revealed the following article, “The Meaning of Voice in Disney’s ‘The Little Mermaid’”, on a blog called Of Fact and Fantasy. The author draws attention to the difference in characterisation between Disney’s Ariel and the little mermaid in Hans Christian Andersen’s original story. Disney’s Ariel is remembered as “a fiery, headstrong heroine who speaks her mind”, but Andersen’s mermaid is “shy and introverted throughout the story”. What really caught my attention is the author’s mention of an analysis of the original. In “The Merciless Tragedy of Desire: An Interpretation of H.C. Andersen’s ‘Den Lille Havfrue”, Jørgen Dines Johansen interprets H.C. Andersen’s mermaid’s silence as following:
“Not only is she withdrawn around her family underwater as she longs for a life on the surface — her refusal to speak to the prince or any other humans, despite having full physical ability to do so at the beginning of the story, demonstrates that the mermaid does not believe she can reveal herself as she is. Therefore, when the sea witch demands the mermaid’s voice as payment for her transformation, Johansen argues that it is merely an external realization of the mermaid’s beliefs. She thinks that she must ‘silence’ herself in order to belong.”
Social anxiety disorder is characterised by a fear of being scrutinised, resulting in withdrawn behaviour, or sometimes a masquerading of one’s true identity, in the form of ‘putting on a show’. It’s about pleasing people: your own needs and authenticity are traded for the perceived needs of others. You endure pain because — through genetic disposition, and an immature misinterpretation of negative childhood experiences or trauma — you have learned that ‘fitting in’ is necessary for survival.
In the original story, the little mermaid doesn’t get the prince to fall in love with her, while being unable to speak. When he falls in love with someone else, she is faced with a decision to kill the prince and reunite with her sisters in the ocean, or die herself. Because she decides not to kill him, she is rewarded an existence as a “Daughter of the Air” as a compromise, and receives a new voice. Of course this would be too dark for the Disney version, in which there is a happy ending: Ariel marries the prince, but only after getting her voice back.
In both versions, the meaning of voice as an expression of your true self plays a role, but it’s more palpable in the original story. Andersen’s little mermaid realises that her voice is essential to who she is and in silencing herself, she is unable to form a meaningful connection. The moral of the story could be interpreted as: “Don’t sacrifice who you truly are to fit in and get someone to fall in love with you.”
I realised a similar meaning appears in another story: The Legend of The Selkie. Sometimes referred to as the Irish version of a mermaid, selkies are half seal, half human being, but are often able to shapeshift into full human form. Besides Irish mythology, selkies also appear in Scottish, Faroese, Manx and Icelandic folk tales, and are well known in coastal communities. Although the tales vary, the selkie is often forced to marry a human and her seal skin has to be hidden for her to fit into the human world. But — sometimes through the help of her children or being reminded of her true nature in some way — she is able to find her seal skin, and can’t help but return to the ocean, her home, where she can be her true, seal self. Although the role voice plays in selfhood is not explicitly mentioned, the symbolism is clear: don’t transform or hide who you truly are to fit in.
By now I had made up my mind. The name of the platform would be Finding the Sound Within, and the imagery for the logo would be based on a shell. And suddenly I just started seeing them everywhere — in display cabinets, in books, even in the marble of the stairs at my parents’ house. I remembered collecting conch shells as a child, and holding them to my ear to hear the ocean. Simplified, in the form of a spiral, the shell also looks like an unfinished treble clef. It was the perfect symbol for sound.
So I started playing around. How could I show that the sound is coming out of the shell? I played around with sound waves, curved lines, swishes, dots; more detail, less detail; colour, no colour. But in the end, because the logo has to work as a small image, I settled on something simple, created with the help of Illustrator’s spiral tool and pen tool.
As a UX designer, designing logos is not my expertise, but I really enjoyed the creative thought process and learning something new through each step I tried to accomplish. What’s important to me right now, is that it tells a story and resonates. In future, the more I learn, I might consider improving the logo.
