I designed a brand new brand for Teleo, a new team collaboration app with all the tools you need in one place.

The main logo is comprised of a telescope sighting beyond a starry, domed sky. The telescope signals Teleo's value as a tool for communication over distances, and nicely associates with the name (Say it with me: Teleo, telescope). The brand includes alternate logos with telescope head, lens face, and initial T.

Initial concepts played with the classical philosophical term teleology. From Wikipedia:

Teleology is a reason or explanation for something in function of its end, purpose or goal. ... For instance, Aristotle claimed that an acorn's intrinsic telos is to become a fully grown oak tree.

Hence, the acorn/oak and chicken/egg concepts. Also, antelopes.

The telescope concept was promising, but missing the oomf. I added shading with gradients to give the scene depth with a sense of lighting. The telescope lens could better reflect the sky. The telescope legs got beefed up to make it feel more stable.

The shaded imagery was looking hot. But it wouldn't hold up in every application. So I designed flat-color and one-color variations of all the designs.

That rainbow will shine on forever.

Interested in a logo for your work? Get in touch! Email yo@metafizzy.co to get started.

Metafizzy turned 7 years old on December 1st. Here are the big ticket items of the seventh year:

• Paternity leave January through April
• Infinite Scroll v3
• Fizzy School
• Logo Pizza vol. 2

See ya for numero ocho.

Happy New Year!

Take a look at last years Every vector 2016.

Huebee, the one click color picker, is now MIT licensed. Huebee is now free to use for any application, no commercial license necessary.

Huebee was created as a smaller, simpler plugin to compliment Metafizzy's other heavy-duty plugins. While it gained a decent amount of usage, it hasn't gained enough to warrant a spot in the Metafizzy commercial library line-up. So I've shook off its commercial aspirations and set it free as a completely free-to-use library. May it buzz happily through your fields.

Fizzy School is in — Lessons in JavaScript for anyone writing jQuery.

In supporting Metafizzy's plugins, I get to see a lot of other people's code. Over the years, I've seen that most people aren't having trouble with the plugins themselves. Rather, their issues deal with missing key JavaScript concepts.

jQuery makes writing browser JavaScript so accessible, it's easy to skip over some of JavaScript's core concepts. Fizzy School covers these concepts so novice developers can fill in the missing areas in learning JavaScript and jQuery.

Lessons have focused content, editable demos, re-usable code, and complimentary videos. If you're a beginner JS coder, Fizzy School is for you. Learn up!

If you're a JS pro, Fizzy School is for you to better understand the blind spots in JavaScript education. These lessons may seem obvious, but they are difficult to discover. Too much education is scattered across Stack Overflow questions, GitHub Issues, and various blog posts.

The lessons, demos, and videos are all readily available for you to learn for free. No paywalls.

If just learn one lesson, make it Cache jQuery objects. Everybody should know this one! It's a powerful concept that opens the door to understanding variables and functions.

As Metafizzy uses Gulp for running tasks, I write a lot of Gulp plugins. For example, here's a simple one to add a file's basename to the Vinyl file object.

var path = require('path');
var transfob = require('transfob');

gulp.src('content/*.hbs')
  // add basename data
  .pipe( transfob( function( file, enc, next ) {
    file.basename = path.basename( file.path, '.hbs' );
    next( null, file );
  })
  // ..

This plugin uses transfob, a tiny, no-dependency replacement for through2.obj. The name transfob comes from "Transform object." As I dug into through2's source and node's Stream Transform class, I discovered there wasn't much code needed to work with Gulp streams. It's in fact so small, I can include its entire source code here:

var Transform = require('stream').Transform;

module.exports = function transfob( _transform ) {
  var transform = new Transform({
    objectMode: true
  });
  transform._transform = _transform;
  return transform;
};

I use transfob for all the Metafizzy docs sites.

through2 is a proper utility for streams, so you may need it for more heavy lifting. But for my purposes, working with Gulp, transfob is all I need. So, If you're writing Gulp plugins, consider switching out through2.obj for transfob.