A little more tha a year ago I chose the British ‘Mod Symbol’ as this site’s favicon for no other reason except that The Who are one of my favorite bands. Hey, the site needed a bit of identity at the time (it needs even more now) and the colors worked. I started using it as my icon for iChat discussions as well, it became a part of my identity. My buddy Mark (a pilot) queried me on why I was using the RAF plane marking as my icon. I hadn’t even made the connection between the two, I figured I do some research on this at some point, but I explained the ‘Mod thing’ to him, and life was once again good.
I hadn’t seen any other sites using the Mod symbol, so I figured I was ‘the guy guy with the mod symbol identity’. That is until recently, when I was reading some comments left on the Hicksdesign site and saw a comment by Malarkey with a gravatar, a gravitar of the mod symbol. I immedialtly click over to Malarkey’s site and saw a beautfly crafted CSS/XHTML site with a giant Mod symbol as a background image in the header graphic and a Mod Symbol favicon.
So now I’m sharing the Mod symbol with Malarkey (I’m sure he doesn’t know that I’ve been using it as well). But, he’s making better use of it, put much more effort in to his (very nice) design and to top it off, he’s actualy British. I’ve been thinking about using a header graphic including the symbol for months (on the back burner of course), now, I’m not so sure.
What do I know about this symbol? A little research told me that this type of design is called a roundel. There’s a Roundels of the World site that shows UK’s Type D Roundel is the one we’re talking about. It turns out that the MoD (Ministry of Defence) had an issue with clothing (and other) companies using the RAF roundel. The courts ruled against the MoD in January of 2004 and the Roundel can be reproduced.