Arizona began life as a business software company I conceived in my bedroom in 1988, aged 13. In my young mind, Arizona sounded like a very cool name for a company. I remember taking the idea to my stepdad, and he suggested adding the word Systems to give it some commercial weight. He worked as a management consultant and probably knew what he was talking about.
I designed the logo myself, imagining the heat and vastness of a place I’d never seen. My mum typed up the headed paper and photocopied it for me, using the best 1980’s office tech available:
The “city skyline” on my letterhead was, somewhat accidentally, San Francisco. Hopefully nobody in the actual state of Arizona inspected it too closely. I didn’t even know Arizona wasn’t a city. All I knew was there was desert heat, strange mountains, and those huge American highways.
Armed with red and black felt-tip pens, and a ruler, I began drawing adverts and promotional pages for my fictional software house. I offered utilities like databases and money-management tools for home users and small businesses. I’d been reading computer magazines that reviewed database programs, and I was captivated by their colourful menus, branching options, and wild user interfaces.
My plan, such as it was, involved building a little software universe of my own. I could already imagine the menus and options and believed I might be able to code them in BASIC if I tried hard enough. Never mind that I knew nothing about tax, mortgages, or the “problems” I was trying to solve. The point was that they would all be branded with my desert-sun logo.
Alas, the company didn’t progress much beyond paper. I remember creating a few cassettes with demo screens, but they’re lost now. Eventually I drifted toward new interests, studied architecture, and spent much of my working life in and around residential and commercial design, interiors, and product design.
Recently, though, it felt like the right moment to breathe life back into that childhood dream. I have the time, the energy, and finally the skills to do it justice. And it seemed only proper to resurrect the original name. To warm up, I pushed my old freehand letterhead through some AI tools. They produced various interpretations of my 1988 logo – Gemini made an interesting version which I redrew to get the final logo:
I’ve dropped the word Systems (for now) because a single-word company name seems more current somehow. And I’ll be focusing on games, at least to start with. It’s funny: child-me wanted to make business software, and adult-me immediately gravitated toward game development.
As the saying goes, the child is father of the man.
Looking great P!!
Very nice, cohesive design. Colourway is striking
Awesome 🙂