How my personal mark came from my own name, a love of building things from small pieces, and one letter that refused to work until I flipped an S.
SANS is my personal identity. I wanted the logo to feel like something I would naturally make. Not just something that looked good, but something that reflected how I think, build, and solve problems.
A name that was already there
My full name is Santhoshkumar Sakthivel. I wanted my identity to stay connected to my real name, so I took the first three letters of Santhoshkumar and the first letter of Sakthivel.
Santhoshkumar+SakthivelSanS
It wasn't a name I had to invent. It was already there. I just had to find it.
Starting from how I build
I didn't want to design a symbol first and attach a meaning to it afterwards. The starting point was simpler: what do I like, and how do I build things?
When I work with code and ideas, I think in building blocks. I take small pieces, connect them, experiment, and gradually end up with something larger.
A big visual reference for that was Minecraft. Everything in it is built from blocks. You start with single pieces and use them to create something much bigger. That felt familiar, so instead of drawing the letters with curves, I decided to construct SANS out of blocks.
Constructing the letters
Each letter sits on the same 5 × 5 grid of square blocks. The rules were simple: keep it geometric, minimal, modular, and consistent, and make every letter recognizable.
The first letters came together naturally.
The problem with N
S and A felt natural in blocks. N didn't. I tried several versions. Some were technically correct and some read clearly as an N, but none of them felt right.
The first two use a diagonal, the way an N is usually drawn. But on a block grid, a diagonal becomes a staircase: the blocks only touch at their corners. Every other letter is made of solid, straight runs, so the diagonal broke the boxy language I wanted the whole logo to share.
The third drops the diagonal and becomes an arch. It keeps the boxy feel, but it is just the A with its crossbar removed. Next to the real A, it didn't hold up as its own letter.
They looked like an N, but they didn't look like SANS.
The accidental discovery
While experimenting with the letterforms, I rotated an S by 90° and then accidentally flipped it. Suddenly I was looking at something I hadn't been trying to design, and it worked.
The flipped form reads as three vertical strokes joined at the top-left and the bottom-right. That is the path an N takes: up, over, down, over, up. But it is built from the same straight runs as every other letter. There is no diagonal and no staircase, just blocks.
It is also, quite literally, an S. Reflect the S across its diagonal and you get the N. The two S's and the N in the middle of the word are the same shape looking in different directions.
I wasn't trying to make the letter this way. I found it by experimenting, and the accident turned out to be the solution.
The final logo
- Geometric: built entirely from square blocks. No curves, no diagonals.
- Modular: every letter is assembled from the same unit, on the same grid.
- Minimal: very few elements, so the letterforms themselves carry the identity.
- Personal: the way it was made mirrors the way I like to think and build.
Construction
The whole wordmark comes from one rule: a square module, placed on a grid.
- Module
- 1 × 1
- Letter
- 5 × 5
- Letter spacing
- 1 module
- Wordmark
- 23 × 5
Every stroke is exactly one module thick, and every gap inside a letter is at least one module wide. The spacing between letters is the same single module, so the word reads as one evenly built object instead of four separate tiles.
Negative space
The blocks are only half of the logo. The empty modules do just as much work.
The openings in each letter are what make it readable. The S is told apart from the N only by where its gaps sit, and the A becomes an A because of the small counter at the top and the opening at the bottom. Positive form plus negative space makes the letter.
Where it lives
SANS is a personal mark for a developer, so it lives mostly on screens:
- the full wordmark in the header of this site
- an S monogram on a solid block, for small spaces like icons
- social preview images, like the one for this post
Because it is made of a single square module, it stays crisp at small sizes. The pieces line up with the pixel grid instead of fighting it.
It started with a name. It became a system.
SANS started with a simple question: what could I create from my own name?
The visual direction came from something I naturally enjoy, building things from smaller pieces. Minecraft gave me the first visual connection, and coding shaped how I approached construction and experimentation.
The most important part of the process wasn't the original idea. It was getting stuck on the N, trying different approaches, and accidentally finding the form that became the final direction.
The result is a logo that feels personal to me. Not because every part of it was planned, but because the process of making it reflects how I think.