Pixievolt No. 1 Logo Creator gives you a lot of settings and buttons for making parodies of my logo, but just one button comprises the main reason why I work on this silly thing:
There’s a bit more to it than just picking one item from each list – there’s some biasing going on to reflect my opinions on what will make a fun logo.
Text Effects
If I wanted to randomize the Italic, Small Caps, and Glow options the straightforward way, the app would randomly pick “on” or “off” for each one. With 3 options, this makes a 1-in-8 (17.5%) chance of turning on all of them, and the same for turning them all off. I think picking all options, and especially picking no options, wouldn’t make for a very interesting logo.
The alternative I came up with uses weighted random number generation to pick a number from 0 to 3. 1 and 2 each have a 40% chance to be picked, 3 has 15%, and 0 has just 5%. After choosing a number, the app randomly picks that many options to turn on, and leaves the rest off.
Fonts
In my opinion, DejaVu Sans is the most boring of the provided font choices, but it’s the one that looks best with Small Caps turned on. So, the app picks a font after it picks text effects using the above process, and uses weighted random number generation to do so. If Small Caps was turned on, Candela and Comic Neue each get a weight of 3, while DejaVu Sans gets 4. Otherwise, Candela and Comic Neue each have a weight of 2, and DejaVu Sans gets only 1.
Icons
I like all 10 of the icons I made available, but I feel the app should emphasize the icons that are reusable under Creative Commons terms. Thus, the icon also gets chosen using weighted random number generation, with all CC-licensed icons getting a weight of 4, while icons too personal to me for CC licensing (Lightning Sprite & Lightning Bolt) get a weight of 3.
For fellow code nerds, here’s the complete source code for the randomizer module.
Go fire up Logo Creator and give that Randomize button a few clicks! There could be a very amusing logo in it for you.