Logos and Meaning: A Shunting Yard

In Victor Frankl’s 1946 book Man’s Search for Meaning, a book about his struggle for survival in Auschwitz and other concentration camps, he speaks of life’s primary motivational force as the “will to meaning”.

This got me thinking about my own struggle to find meaning, especially in my creative work. Frankl, a psychotherapist, pioneered a therapeutic doctrine he called Logotherapy. The word logos, derived from Greek, denotes “meaning”. How ironic, I thought, as I had devoted so much of my life to making logos and in doing so, I had misplaced my own logos.

For me, there has always been a kind of suffocation in surviving as a freelance designer, what Frankl called existential frustration. Not the dramatic, crisis kind, but the slow erosion of self, the way you wake up one day and realise you've spent years building a life that isn't yours. I didn't hate my work and on the surface it had always seemed plausible. I just always felt like something was missing. It was a vacuum, a strange and conformist emptiness.

When we set out on a creative career, many of us are driven by a deep, internal spark. David Bowie said:

“Never play to the gallery… Always remember that the reason that you initially started working is that there was something inside yourself that you felt that if you could manifest in some way, you would understand more about yourself and how you coexist with the rest of society. I think it's terribly dangerous for an artist to fulfil other people's expectations, they generally produce their worst work when they do that”.

Bowie often argued that being an artist requires a degree of “social dysfunctionalism”, a deep, perhaps irrational, urge to create. For a long time, I kept my design work and my love of art strictly separated, secretly afraid to fully pursue what I was meant to do. But the search for meaning eventually caught up with me.

I have come to realise that design is no longer a fixed discipline. I have reached a point where I can no longer define my work by specific deliverables or static categories.

This realisation is the catalyst behind my rebrand. I am no longer operating just as a traditional branding service; instead, I am embracing the role of a cultural producer and strategic storyteller. This post officially marks the launch of my new Hybrid Studio for Design, Art & Visual Storytelling.

My practice is now structured to move fluidly between brand identity, full-stack web development, and my fine art. By adapting my skill stack, I am ensuring that the ideas and the meaning behind them remain the priority. The medium I choose—whether a responsive website or a charcoal drawing—is now secondary to the vision. It is a way of working that finally honours the full scope of creativity, allowing me to execute concepts across disciplines without being bottlenecked.

I have come to appreciate that careers and lives aren't straight lines. They're messy, loud, full of false starts and sudden stops. The scars are there, in the rust and the bent metal. But Frankl wrote that suffering ceases to be suffering the moment it finds meaning.

While standing in an empty shunting yard on the foothills of Devil's Peak taking these photos, I realised that changing tracks to pursue this fluid creative practice has changed my relationship with myself, my past, and my future. I have finally found my logos.

Welcome to The Journal, and welcome to the new studio.