To my surprise Massimo was quite enamored with our simple slash logo, and after he “ran the geometry” there was mathematically no improvements that could be made so we decided to leave it alone. I don’t quite understand the particulars of logo geometry but Massimo assured me this part was more science than art.

Feel free to run the math yourself, it checks out.

Fortunately, the slash also seemed to be geometrically congruent to the text element in our full logo. Perhaps it was because I used the same font to create both, but Massimo’s theorems concluded that this was indeed, a rare event and we had just lucked out.

From many of his sketches, it was clear that trust was going to be central to our relationship.

Still, Massimo was unsatisfied. Our slash “had no heart, no story to tell, no essence.” I told him that I thought a great logo was more about what people put into it than what people got out of it, but he disagreed. He had a plan and a stack of small paper notebooks.

I will torture the dormant soul from this monument to mediocrity. I will burn it down to nothing, let the ashes whisper a name, and call forth a phoenix of form and function from the flames of a thousand iterations. I am. Massimo Guzmán. -Massimo Guzmán

I didn’t see him for the next two days but I knew he was still in the apartment. He would leave these Field Notes all over the place, filled with incoherent scratching and semi-formed designs. Occasionally I would see a shadow move into another room but when I followed it there was no one there. One night I was awoken to violent screaming but it stopped as suddenly as it had started.

On the third day he had arisen from his futon and started absorbing parallelogram-shaped grilled cheeses, which is when I noticed something was different about him. I knew he was close.

“Massimo, what the fuck man, did you use all the bread — ” I asked, but he interrupted me.

Horizontal plane, why dost thou spurn me! Betrayer of the senses! Go back to the lesser dimension from whence you came!

He explained that the answer had thus far eluded him because he was only writing in his notebook; the horizontal plane. He could see the answer but it had no form. He could not touch it. He needed to ask the question in the vertical plane as well. He quickly began drawing on little notes and sticking them to the wall.

The genius of his process was becoming obvious to me now. By putting the designs on the wall, we could point to them, and stand in front of them with our arms folded. We could blankly gaze into this mosaic of inspiration and listen as if a tiny paper symphony was playing a discordant masterwork.