June 17, 2026

I have not designed logos for a while.

For a stretch of my life, I used to do it for startups and corporate customers. I always had a ridiculous amount of fun with it.

Logo work looks small from the outside, but when it is good, it is really a concept game. You take a company, a person, a product, or a feeling, and you start playing with visual ideas. You mix things that do not obviously belong together. You look for references in weird places. You let patterns emerge.

You wait for the happy accident.

That was always the part I loved most. Not the final polished mark, although that matters. The fun is the search, and then that OMG moment, a jolt of energy, whether it's contours appearing in your mind or actually seeing it on paper, and knowing "yes that's it!".

I wanted something like that for my personal blog: andrewyang.ai.

Image 1: Option A — AY Monogram, Image 2: Option B — Neural Node, Image 3: Option C — Stylized A

At first, the obvious directions came quickly.

An AY monogram. A neural node. A stylized A. They were all reasonable. They looked like logos. They could probably work as favicons. But they also felt like answers from the normal universe of personal branding: clean, legible, professional, slightly dead.

A lot of company logos look like this. Obviously designed by AI, and in one shot, because the person saw it and went "yeah AI did it better than I could", and they applied no personal taste, and no further thoughts to it.

I learned from years of designing logos and brand materials that you MUST go further.

It's hard, lots deadends, sometimes for hours, sometimes for weeks.

But struggle further you must.

Back to my logo design: andrewyang.ai is not really a personal brand site in that sense. It is not a corporate VC page. It is not a polished thought-leadership brochure. It is closer to a field notebook from ME: an investor who, completely unexpectedly, now spends most of his life inside AI tools, terminals, browser windows, drafts, agents, and half-broken workflows.

So I wanted the mark to come from that world.

The first thing I thought of was the terminal prompt: >_.

One reason is that I started using Codex, and really liked its logo. But as a non-technical person I didin't know what it meant, so I had Codex explain it to me. These days I can spend 8~12 hours a day inside coding environments. It feels less like using a tool and more like inhabiting a room. The prompt is not just a symbol of programming. It is the doorway into a mode of thinking.

Then came the little accident. I was like "hey that looks like something is missing…"

And added a <, which turned it into:

I loved it at first sight, so of course went to my sycophantic AI for confirmation.

Below, the exact verbatim convo I had with Gamma agent:

Okay that settles it. I'm a genius 🤣.

But seriously, I loved it, and since it's my personal site, I'm king.

So my sycophantic Gamma Agent went to work, spinning out variations:

Here's why I love it, and why it speaks to me: it's the perfect representation of my life, and how I believe my life should be lived.

It is the expression of someone squinting at a problem, annoyed, concentrating, slightly overwhelmed, still trying. That is much closer to the truth of my current relationship with AI than a clean monogram could ever be.

It's the common thread across tons of pieces I've written and published/not published: work life gets harder with AI, not easier, and that's the way it should be. It's about the struggle.

There is a funny connection here to Attention Is All You Need.

Think about the added <. It closes the loop, > and < pointing in the middle = focused attention.

For transformer models, attention is a technical mechanism. For humans working with AI, I think it is also the whole game. You can have agents collecting information, taking actions, drafting emails, reading documents, surfacing options, and coordinating work. You can have a small army of them doing your bidding.

But the value still comes from where human attention lands.

The agent can widen the field. It can put more material in front of you. It can compress time. It can make the effects of a clear thought travel much farther than they used to.

But the clear thought still has to come from you.

It is about the fact that even in a world of autonomous agents, the scarce thing is still the human moment of focus.

And honestly, that struggle is not always elegant.

A lot of the most valuable work now feels like staring at four broken threads, trying to figure out which one matters. It feels like watching agents do impressive things and then somehow miss the obvious thing. It feels like having more leverage than ever, while also needing more taste, judgment, and attention than ever.

So I like that >_< is not too clean.

It has a little friction in it. It is a terminal prompt, a closed loop, an attention bracket, and a tiny face of frustration. It sits at the intersection I keep writing about: technical and personal, agentic and human, power and struggle.

Maybe that is what I missed about logo design.

The best marks are not explanations. They are compressed collisions. A good mark lets multiple meanings live inside one small shape, and then lets you keep discovering them.

So yeah, Gamma Agent, go crazy, and let's pump out merchandises LOL.

And let's play with it in Womp