Quba’s online presence receives a little refresh today. Together with a number of naming and design adjustments, it’s also moving to a new domain: QubaXR.com. All the legacy “VR” addresses and URLs will continue forwarding to the correct content.
To see what has changed, take a look at the animation above. To learn why – read on.
Why XR?
When I first introduced the Quba\VR identity, I had a somewhat overzealous attitude towards virtual reality. Don’t get me wrong: I am still extremely enthusiastic about VR. It’s possibly the coolest medium of expression I have had a chance to work in.
Looking back at the past several years though, I realize that VR projects were only a small fraction of my creative output.
XR is a much better catch-all term for the work I do – combining virtual reality along augmented, mixed and the like. While the official definition of XR reads Extended Reality, I like to think of it as (Quba) Across Realities – allowing me to include my work in experiential design, physical space under the same umbrella.
Backslash had to go
I really enjoyed incorporating a backslash character into the original ID. It fit perfectly between the stylized letters A\V and… caused a whole lot of unexpected problems.
If you are not a programmer or an ASCII artist, chances are you rarely, if ever use the backslash character. As a result I had to constantly stay on top of all mentions, festival appearances and catalogues – as in majority of cases the copy would mistakenly feature a forward-slash. (Unacceptable!)
Backslash is also an escape character in many programming languages, leading to errors in form submissions, video titles and other CMS engines.
In the end, QubaXR just rolls off the tongue, while QubaundefinedVR does not.
Nip and Tuck
The original identity looked just fine in large sizes. When shrunk down however, thin lines of the logo would generate nasty aliasing artifacts and texture flicker. To remedy that, both the full name lockup and the Q emblems received a little bit of fattening and are now more legible across every media and resolution.
The goal of this identity facelift was to be as unobtrusive as possible. The color scheme and typefaces remained unchanged, although I did adjust typographic ramp on the website for better legibility on high resolution displays.
There is a myriad of other small changes under the hood – mostly removing unnecessary details and cleaning up the presentation. Most won’t notice anything has changed – which is precisely my intention.