Two Lines That Cross (Without Looking Like a Shuffle Button): Making the AlwaysRoute.com Logo

After twelve rounds and 49 little vector files to land on the three-bar logo for home-lab.net, I genuinely thought my brief, accidental career as an art director was over.

Then I decided that the networking idea holding my planned homelab setup together—a small cloud relay that lets my phone and laptop reach home from anywhere without opening a single port on my router—deserved its own quiet corner of the internet: alwaysroute.com.

Which meant calling the robot design team back in for one more job. At least this time I already knew the golden rule: start taking things away early.

Why three server bars wouldn’t work this time

With home-lab.net, the picture in my head was physical hardware sitting quietly in a closet: three flat white server bars stacked on top of each other with one tiny blue light. It feels solid and stationary, because a heavy tower full of hard drives is solid and stationary.

AlwaysRoute is the exact opposite. There isn’t a box in a closet to draw. The whole idea is movement between two places that normally refuse to talk to each other:

1. The outside world (cool blue): Phones on cellular data, laptops on hotel Wi-FiWi-FiIEEE 802.11 Wireless NetworkingNetworkingA family of wireless local area network (WLAN) radio protocols based on the IEEE 802.11 standards operating in the 2.4 GHz, 5 GHz, and 6 GHz spectrum bands., and the open internet.
2. Home (warm amber): The private home network tucked behind a closed front door.

Round one: padlocks, globes, and the Shuffle button

Ask an AIAIArtificial IntelligenceAIComputer systems and neural architectures capable of reasoning, code synthesis, pattern recognition, and autonomous agentic execution.—or any icon site—for a “networking or VPNVPNVirtual Private NetworkNetworkingAn encrypted network tunnel that extends a private network across a public network, enabling hosts to send and receive data as if directly connected to the private LAN. logo,” and it immediately reaches into the cybersecurity clipart bin and hands you one of three things:

• A wireframe globe straight out of a 1990s movie.
• A medieval knight’s shield with a giant keyhole in the middle.
• Two crossing arrows that look very familiar.

The globes and shields went straight in the trash. A shield says “keep out.” AlwaysRoute isn’t about blocking things—my home router already does that by keeping every door shut. AlwaysRoute is about getting across the gap.

The crossing arrows felt much warmer. Whenever network engineers explain a tunnel on a whiteboard, they draw two lanes—outside and inside—crossing smoothly in the middle. Great idea, right up until you see two plain crossing arrows drawn cleanly on a dark background and realize what you’ve actually made:

Two grey lines with sharp corners and arrowheads don’t say “private network bridge.” They say “play my 2007 music library in random order.”

Turning a shuffle button into a bridge

Once I saw the shuffle icon, I couldn’t unsee it. Fortunately, three small nudges fixed it completely:

• Start both lines from a dot. A real route starts somewhere. Putting a solid round dot at the beginning of each line immediately made it read like a map between two places instead of a button on a stereo.
• Soften the corners into a smooth S-curve. Swapping the stiff angles for a gentle curve gave the whole mark a calm, flowing feel—more like railway tracks switching lanes than two sticks colliding.
• Bring the arrows slightly closer together at the end. This is my favorite detail, and you barely notice it unless someone points it out. On the left, the blue and amber dots start fairly wide apart. After they cross in the middle, the two arrows finish closer together than where they started—a quiet visual hint that two separate worlds are now connected.

Giving the arrows somewhere to land

Next came the name. When we tried writing alwaysroute.com on a single line next to the two crossing paths, it looked lost—the text floated in the middle while both arrows pointed into empty space above and below it.

Splitting the name onto two stacked lines made everything click right into place:

• always sits on the top lane, right where the warm amber arrow arrives from home.
• route sits on the bottom lane in bright blue, right where the outside arrow lands, with a quieter .com tucked on the end.

The finished logo

Here it is on dark and light backgrounds, along with the little square icon at browser-tab sizes to make sure it still holds up when shrunk down to a tiny speck:

Because the two lines are drawn as clean, continuous strokes, I couldn’t resist adding one tiny extra touch on alwaysroute.com: a soft pulse of light gliding quietly along each curve in opposite directions, like traffic flowing smoothly over a bridge at night.

Accidentally building a little family

Stepping back and looking at all three sites side by side, my favorite part was a happy accident:

• stuurman.com uses warm amber for my personal writing and photography.
• home-lab.net uses bright sky blue for the homelab server in the closet.
• alwaysroute.com takes that exact sky blue and warm amber and crosses them right in the middle.

I didn’t sit down with a grand branding masterplan to make that happen—it just worked out that way. Two dots, two smooth curves, and not a single padlock or globe in sight.