This design is the final product of when I decided to make Actively Autistic back in January of 2020. A new day was just beginning (it was 1 AM aka 0100) and I was just thinking to myself about how school was difficult and I couldn’t wait to get out. How I felt like I was failing because nothing I did helped and I felt like I wasn’t being helped as I should be. I was still learning about my brand new community and how to navigate it. I had also just barely learned about Auti$m $peaks, who they were, how damaging they were to the community, and how everyone who isn’t Autistic listens to them because they don’t know any better.

My friend Todd, also known as The Modern Viking, just started his own podcast and I thought that it was a great idea for me to start one too - I had always wanted to do so, but never did because I didn’t know what I was doing, and so I asked Todd for some pointers. That night I got on my phone, downloaded a logo maker app, and got to work. I settled on a brain for a few reasons: 1. I’m very interested in the brain, and I’m a psychology major, the brain is very cool 2. Our brains as Neurodivergents are very different from a Neurotypical’s brain 3. There’s diversity in this image, and to me, that shows that that’s who we are & 4. After experimenting with a few other design ideas, the brain was the best choice.

Once I settled on the brain, I saw that I could experiment with the colors and decided to do blue (my favorite color) but because of A$ I didn’t want to support it. Then I had an idea. What if part of it is blue, tying in the stigma from A$ and the other part of it is red for #redinstead. The blue part is what people think Autism is. A very solid, uniform way of being, while the red, pink, and orange part are diverse colors with (what looks like to me) neurons, showing that we are all different, non-uniform, and can think for ourselves.

Thusly, the Actively Autistic logo was born and I’m still proud of it to this very day.