CactusMagelord profile pictures

Early Logos (2015-2016)

I believe the very first logos are lost to time, but here are the earliest three that I could find. In this era the basic concept of the logo was already established - a line down the middle, two arms with one higher than the other, and two magic orbs the same size as the arms. The three lines are especially visibly individually-drawn here, using paint.net's line tool. However, many elements are inconsistent; the thickness of the logo, drastic variation in the colour of the orbs, extra effects and gradients, and the presence of wonkily-placed text reading out the name. The logos began still, but I soon began adding simple animations for places where GIF profile pictures moved.

Logo-X and HyperLogo (2016-2018)

Based on the shirt design, a generation of cactus logos was formed with square arms. The first Discord icon came first, with a pixel recreation heavily distorted with glow effects and a repeating gradient for a dark CRT-esque look. Then, Logo-X created a heavy focus on a circle surrounding the logo (from an earlier design in 2016), introducing a white colour and making the inside grey with a shaded cactus. Logo-X had a couple of different animations as it was around the time I got Nitro. The first zoomed out with polar inversion and flashed from top to bottom back into existence via the bright white circle, and the second used different polar inversion to slowly suck into itself like a black hole, reusing frames from the first animation to flash back into place.

HyperLogo replaced the circle with the entire cactus being white, slowly filling up with colour as if painted and passing on a blob of purple paint from the arm through both magic orbs arcing overhead. The orbs them shift into action with one flying backward and one sweeping forward to reset the GIF to its starting uncoloured state. This logo normalised the flat colours that would go on to be used in every future logo. There was a HyperLogo 1.1 that started coloured and only went through the animation a single time back to being fully coloured again then freezing, but this was short-lived. HyperLogo 2 came next, using the same cactus from the first with tweaked colours, but instead reflecting the Logo-Xes more with polar inversion animations; a zoom fills the screen with green, a fully black cactus is polar-inverted in, zooms in with unseeded crawling dents to reform the black background, and another polar inversion bulges the original coloured cactus back into place to loop.

The logos of this era (excluding the Discord icon) favoured a purple closer to dark blue than to magenta. Over time I would shift this to normalise the magenta-y purple again, but I do like the darker colours here. The darker orbs are referenced in some other works, such as the pixel cactus emotes where the "old" emote had the darker orbs of these older logos.

Logo-Y Iterations (2018-2019)

Iterating on the naming convention of the Logo-Xes, the Logo-Y series was created next. The first Logo-Y was loosely based on the first HyperLogo; after experiencing vertical morphology into a stretched spinning "barrel", the logo reappears in greyscale and is recoloured with a diagonal swipe. This was the first to use the rounded cactus template. Logo-Y2 similarly uses vertical morphology but in the opposite direction, flattening the cactus into a single orb, regenerating the orbs with rapidly spinning tile reflections, then bouncing back into place. This is my personal favourite of the animations.

Logo-Y3 pivoted to a light background and featured a crystalline swipe across to reveal a white upward drop shadow on the cactus, then a black mass bulging rapidly at the screen, animated way too fast to be comfortable. Logo-YIV was made shortly after featuring thickening inky outlines twisting into place, pixellating, then being washed away by a black wave from beneath. The overabundance of brightness was darkened in the Onyx variant shown, but this only affected the borders in practice.

Logo-YV went back to a black background and started the same way as Y2, except the green circle keeps moving down, gets "pancaked" into a pixellated version and flies towards the screen in a downward arc underneath, as the cactus regenerates as a neon outline with a polar inversion akin to a reversed X2, and flashes in a blobby burst into the original logo. Then, Logo-YVI iterated on these ideas again, establishing the new (old?) orb colour. The bottom of the cactus gets polar-inversion sucked while a neon outline morphs in horizontally, before laser beams relight the magic orbs that cause the cactus to regenerate in chunks. Then, impressively for paint.net, the neon outline falls down to the side in 3D and flashes to "despawn".

Logo-Z Iterations (2019-2020)

The Logo-Z series made the shift from a black background to a transparent one, necessitating clean borders at the point of transparency as GIFs don't support semitransparency. The first Logo-Z features similar wiggling magic orbs to the first GIF of the shirt design back from 2016, but the orbs intermittently vanish in a circular pulse and are recast with a flaming effect. Logo-Z2 features a black background appear from above, then takes inspiration from HyperLogo 2 to make the cactus black and the background green, keeping the orbs the same. Next, purple is pushed in briefly making the orbs black and the cactus green again, quickly overtaken by the original transparent background restoring the colours. (The bottom corners here snap abruptly as it was designed with a circular frame in mind, so this wouldn't usually be visible.)

Logo-Z3 continues the trend of inspiration from previous logos, taking the neon outline idea from YV and YVI and adapting it into being printed onto a swung-in black background by the cactus getting pushed in with a flash, as if it was a photograph of some sort. The neon outlines here seem to extend backwards into an array. Logo-Z4 finally goes fully original, making the cactus' resolution suddenly drop to a pixelated style, where a camera in 3D passes through the arms and turns around to see the cactus launch the orbs which are recast with a pixelly swish effect as the resolution returns. During the low-res section, a black floor filling the bottom half of the frame dithers into and out of existence. The orb colour is slightly tweaked here to the colour still used today.

Logo-Y2's Redemption Arc (2020-)

After Z4, I wanted to start using Logo-Y2 again as it was still my favourite animation. However, the logo was quite outdated; it had a solid black background and the old orb colours. So I decided to remake Y2 in the style of the Z series, dubbing it the "Zemake". It begins and ends with a transparent background and the orb colours were adjusted to fit the new hue. Due to the blurring that came with the spinning slash effects though, I decided to keep the black background for most of the animation, swiping in and out at the start and the end.

Later, as I ended up starting to be called "Catcus" over "Cactus" in multiple places (since it's apparently a common misspelling), I decided to temporarily add little cat ears to the logo's orbs, so it was now Logo-Y2 Zeneko. I ended up keeping this version long-term, and then added an ally flag as a glitch effect panning up for Logo-Y2 Azeneko, which is my current profile picture of choice.

Variants and Spinoffs

Over the years a number of temporary variants were made of different profile pictures. Commonly this was around the time of holidays - for Halloween, I added rudimentary glowing red eyes to Logo-X back in the day and called it CactusRagelord. More recently, I've had a couple of variants with a santa hat, including Logo-Y2 Azeneko Xmas with a vector style. Around Easter in 2022 someone was showing off art they commissioned of characters having a picnic, and people began to make their profile pictures different zoomed-in features to the art. I ended up picking the grassy background and temporarily added it to my profile picture's background, creating Logo-Y2 Azeneko Shizria.

Multiple profile pictures were also made "blurple" - it's a tradition on Discord's birthday to change your icons to be Discord's signature colour to celebrate, and I did so for three years in a row with X2, YV and then Y2 once I'd decided I liked that animation best, which paved the way to Zemake afterwards. With the forcibly-flat colours and the naturally transparent background of the previous two, it can be said that they each paved the way for HyperLogo and Logo-Z as well, so this series ended up progressing the main logo multiple times.

Beyond profile pictures, there were a number of other logo spinoffs too, mainly used for server icons, featuring interesting static twists on the usually-animated logo.