My Logo For SD Winter 2026!

Today I wanna share an artsy thing that I am incredibly proud of accomplishing!

I've been thinking for a while about creating the poster and/or logo for the speedcubing competitions in my country. I love graphic design in general, so it felt obvious to combine it with one of my more community-focused hobbies.

I've had this idea in my mind for a while, and I decided to finally execute it with the upcoming Santo Domingo Winter 2026 competition!

I thought of the idea on December 7, and I made the initial sketches and worked on it the day after, making a few changes along the way until I made the final version on December 10. It was uploaded on Instagram just a few days ago.

Since it's the Winter competition — even though we don't really experience seasons here — I still wanted to incorporate a Winter element for the logo. Some of the previous competitions just had an image of the cube plastered on a snowflake, or vice-versa, but I knew that something more unique could be done.

I really fixated on the cube's six-way symmetry, as snowflakes are also six-sided, and thought of quite a few ways to do something with that.

Ultimately, I decided on three cubes around a common point with some of their pieces coloured to look like a snowflake of sorts! I made it blue, white, and red, not just because they are cooler colours (the red has a bit of pink), but also since they are the colours of our country's flag.

This was the final version of the poster.

In the full poster I made an entire grid of cubes that goes through the actual graphic section of the poster, with the section containing the event details being left blank for readability.

I also added outlines to the three cubes that actually make up the logo, just so it's clearer what it's supposed to be. I also made the blank pieces slightly lighter, and I even made it so the darkest tiles of the inner cubes are the exact same shade as the lighter tiles of the outer cubes! I just think that's neat.

It was partially inspired by the logo for the 2002 Winter Olympic Games in Salt Lake City, though only the general idea of it being a cubic figure which sort of resembles a snowflake.

Also, here below is a screenshot of the document where I eventually ended up with the final design. On the left are a few other things I did while messing around that ended up converging into that final design.

And that's about it!

I am really glad that I finally got around to making both the logo and the poster for a local speedcubing competiton, and generally just being able to make something artistic again that I can share with you.

I don't want to dwell on this too much, but one of the other reasons I made this is because the most recent competitions have all used Generative AI for their posters, and that's something that kind of upset me for a while. With this I decided to change that myself, because why not?

Shoutout to Alex and Graham from LoadingReadyRun for motivating me to do this. In a recent episode of Good Morning Moonbase they discussed how artists (like me) can help change this just by offering up our skills! Hearing this out loud really inspired me. :)

I love making art and posters like this, so I am glad that I was able to contribute in this way to one of my communities!