During the summer of 2021, I, together with a crack team of some of the best and brightest experts in visualization, co-authored a paper called ‘Illegible Semantics: Exploring the Design Space of Metal Logos’, which was submitted to and accepted by the alt.VIS workshop at IEEE VIS, the premier forum for visualization research and technology.

It’s basically about how Heavy and Extreme Metal logos communicate a story – even if it isn’t always immediately apparent. It’s true! Go see for yourself! I wrote a complete guide on everything you need to know about Metal’s highly codified (sub)genre logo conventions. All you need to do is to one click on one of 50 sample logos.

But if you want to first know more about the paper, you can read a brief summary and conclusive remarks here. There you can also find some additional links.

If you find academic reading too technical, and if you got eight minutes to spare, I got just the thing for you. To present the methods and the results to the Visualization community, I wrote, created, recorded, and edited a video, which went up on YouTube.