About Waste No Spoons

Waste No Spoons was a minimal waste lifestyle blog that ran from 2019 to 2023. It was aimed at helping chronically ill people live a less wasteful, more environmentally conscious lifestyle.  The name comes from the Spoon Theory, a metaphor used by the chronic illness community.

The blog combined the two concepts to create a space where people could talk about how they make changes in their habits, and what zero waste ideas are “worth the spoons” to explore. Many people with chronic illness are overwhelmed by the idea of living zero waste: what about single-use medical supplies? What about days when symptoms are bad? What if I don’t have the physical ability to cook all my food from scratch?

You can learn more about the blog itself here.

Developing the logo

The logo needed to reflect both primary concepts: zero waste, and chronic illness. This one didn’t take much iteration, and the design direction was fairly obvious from the beginning. I took the internationally-known recycling symbol and replaced the arrows with bent spoons.

My main challenge was coloring. It looked a bit bland as just a single, flat gray for the whole symbol. However, spoons are a bit tricky to shade since they’re both reflective and curved. After a while browsing image searches and drawing some references, I had a better grasp of light reflection and bending. I added some subtle shading to one of the spoons, then copy-pasted that for the other two. I quickly realized that I needed to adjust the shading, though; the lighting needed to be consistent between the spoons.

After some quick adjustment, I arrived at the logo displayed above.

For other use cases like embroidery, I used the single-color gray version I first designed.