AJnet Archives: Old Site Logos

This month in the AJnet Archives: Old site logos!

This site has seen many incarnations during its 17 year history. In its earliest days, the site was designed using a combination of Adobe Dreamweaver and Photoshop. I’d make the graphics in Photoshop, then use Dreamweaver to build a template for the layout. Redesigning the site allowed me to exercise my creative muscle while giving the illusion of productivity to my readers, so it was a win-win for me. I honestly think I had more fun changing the site up than I did actually writing for it, so whenever the writer’s block or the boredom got too bad I’d redo the layout. This usually gave me a second wind and motivated me to churn out some more articles.

The downside to using Dreamweaver to design the site was that I had to manually update each individual page one by one. Even though I only put out articles once or twice a month, it was still a tedious chore, one that usually required some Ellio’s pizzas, a couple bottles of Dr. Pepper, and staying up until 5 in the morning. I couldn’t imagine doing it this way now, and I’m glad WordPress lets me update the layout without having to manually update every single page.

I really wanted to do an AJnet Archives article about all the old layouts the site has had over the years. Unfortunately, the few old templates that I haven’t lost would require a lot of work to get displaying properly again, more work than it would be worth. I also had the site removed from the Internet Archive, so grabbing stuff from there is also out of the question.

Thankfully though, I do have many of the old logos that I used for the site. Since I can’t do that article about the old layouts (seriously, I really wanted to do this), this month’s trip into the past via the AJnet Archives will be a look at some of the site’s many different logos. While it’s not a complete collection, there’s still enough to cover most of the site’s history.

While I don’t have the complete thing saved, this was the logo I used when I first launched the site way back in 2007:

The complete logo had “AngryJerk.net” at the bottom in a Copperplate font. This is also the very first iteration of the phoenix logo I would continue to use all the way up to 2022.

The way I made this logo was also kind of clever. For the wings, I used the owl logo for the Bohemian Grove. I took the wing, tweaked it just a little bit, then copied and flipped it. I don’t remember how I did the head, I may have actually drawn it myself.

I was insistent on using a phoenix in my logos. The phoenix symbolized resilience, rising from its own ashes every time it was struck down. That was the message I wanted to send to anyone who would try to silence me: Don’t waste your time, I’ll just rise again from the ashes. The phoenix would later prove to be a fitting mascot, as the site died and came back a few times. I would often accompany later versions of the phoenix with a star, mostly because I didn’t like having a big empty space between the wings.

I would use this logo through 2007, and most of 2008. At some point in 2008 I temporarily switched to a logo that was a black and red silhouette of my face, along with the tagline “The voice of the silent majority” to go along with the inflammatory edgelord persona I had cultivated. I didn’t save this logo though (probably because it looked fucking stupid).

The site itself used red text on a black background. It looked ugly and wasn’t very easy on the eyes, but I didn’t care because I thought black and red were cool and edgy.

In 2009, I finally came to my senses and ditched the black and red for white text over a charcoal black background. I had also begun to play around with Photoshop’s emboss feature, and made this new logo to accompany the change in color:

This is also the first use of the “Profanity, Inanity, Insanity” tagline that would be what I think was the best way to describe the site’s early years.

I started to miss the red and black theme though, so I played around in Photoshop some more until I came up with this later in 2009:

 

I kept the charcoal background and the white text, but I just couldn’t detach myself from red altogether, so I figured the logo would be the best place to use red. I still think the logo looks kind of cool, even though modern web design favors flat minimalism.

There were a couple other variations of this, but I don’t have those saved. The one I remember best was a hybrid of the two I posted, with heavier emphasis on the 3D effect.

In 2011, I became bored with the heavy 3D effect. Most of the internet was beginning to move towards that flat minimalistic style we have now, but I wasn’t quite ready to make that dive just yet. I wanted the logo to pop. So I came up with this compromise, using multiple layers to create a flat-looking but still 3D effect that could have probably passed for a comic book title:

 

I was already moving away from the site’s original purpose of being intentionally inflammatory, and I think that the cartoonishness of this logo was a byproduct of this transition. I was less serious, less angry. AngryJerk.net was more about having fun and not caring.

This was also the first and last time I let the star fly solo. Without the phoenix there, the star just looked stupid. I also regret that red line under the tagline, it made the whole thing look like a cluttered mess and I’m not sure why I thought it looked good.

The site’s 5 year anniversary came around in January of 2012, so to commemorate the milestone I made this gold-emblazoned logo:

Maddox had done something similar for one of his milestones (I believe 15 years?), and I’m pretty sure that’s what inspired this one.

Once the novelty of this wore off (several months), I made what was arguably my cleanest logo:

 

Of all the logos I’ve made for the site, this one has always been my favorite. It’s simple yet elegant, it’s clean and crisp, and it reintroduced the phoenix that I hadn’t really used in a few years. I’d continue to use this logo on the AJnet Forums even after I temporarily shuttered the site later in 2012.

When I brought the site back in 2013, I updated sporadically and didn’t really change the layout again, probably because I was too drunk and high to come up with anything.

I began to slow down on the partying in late 2016, so I decided it was time to focus on the website again. This time though, I wanted something that was easy to maintain. Seriously, I can’t stress enough how much it sucked having to manually update every single page. Thus, I finally made the switch to WordPress.

After scrounging around for a WordPress theme that didn’t suck ass, I made a new logo to go with it, and debuted the new WordPress-powered site in January of 2017:

I had also taken up streaming on Twitch, so eventually I decided to incorporate that into my next logo in early 2018:

 

The drawing of me was made by a guy named Alan way back in 2010. As a streamer, you typically want people to associate your face with your name, and that’s what I was going for. I also moved away from the “Profanity, Inanity, Insanity” tagline, because I felt it might be too abrasive for most of the Twitch crowd (it was; those people are fucking weird). I replaced it with “Rants, Raves, Reviews, Games”. I also made the title blocky, because that was common in Twitch logos.

I eventually made some friends on Twitch who didn’t suck, one of them being an actual artist named Half. I threw Half some money and she made me this in late 2018:

I also had her whip up a less-angry variant of me, which I included when I made the 2019 logo:

This was the first usage of the classic orange AJnet logo that would eventually become the AJnet Organization’s logo currently seen at the bottom of the page, and the site’s favicon.

By this point I had outgrown the whole black and red thing, so being a Philadelphia Flyers fan I settled on orange, black, and white as the new site colors. This is also when I leaned into the AJnet name, preferring to use that over the abrasive AngryJerk.net.

I would flip-flop between AJnet and AngryJerk.net over the next few years. Mostly though, I referred to the site as “AJnet” but used the full site name in the logos, as you see in my logo from 2021…

…and my logo from 2022:

 

Eventually, I moved away from the AngryJerk.net name altogether (aside from the domain name) and fully embraced AJnet in my logos and writing.

So that’s the history of the site’s various logos. I still really wish I could get those old layouts working again, they were great examples of what the 2000’s internet was like, before corporations and outraged idiots overran it.

Anyway, I have a few ideas for next month’s AJnet Archives article that I’m kicking around. I’m leaning towards either an old article that I previously unpublished, or a series of parodies I did making fun of Wikipedia’s “Personal appeals from Jimmy Wales” campaign.

I’ll probably go with the Wikipedia parodies though, since I couldn’t stop laughing when I was rereading them.