For many years, Beneath the Tangles has existed without any key visual to represent it. This approach served the site well, as Beneath the Tangles has always been treated as a medium for community and conversation, not about “branding” in the business sense. A centralized visual element, like a logo, is not something to be taken lightly. It is meant to communicate an organization’s mission and name without compromising itself simply for visual appeal, and it is also something meant to last: A logo that changes often represents its organization as well as a person who changes often (read: not very well!).

But after all these years, as Beneath the Tangles has burgeoned, our social media presence has expanded, and our desire to engage even more readers has grown, we have both realized the need and developed the resources to create a simple, yet meaningful visual to represent everything it is that we do. And that need, in conjunction with more than a month of discussion among the staff and work among several artists, has resulted in the image that you see below.

Although you have probably noticed our new logo on the site and on our Facebook and Twitter pages, I’d like to take just a few moments of your time to break down just why we elected to use this logo and the profound symbolic significance that it has to what we do.

BTT. The first element of our new logo is its resemblance to the letters, “BTT,” standing for Beneath the Tangles. This easily communicates who we are at the most basic level.

Japan. The second element of this logo is the red circle placed behind. One will immediately note its similarity to the modern Japanese flag, which implies our heavy emphasis on Japanese content. Furthermore, the “BTT” mentioned above actually together create a Chinese character (kanji/漢字) used in the Japanese language, sen (阡), which will be explained in further depth below.

Faith and Religion. It is no secret that Beneath the Tangles is a Christian organization. This is emphasized visually by the cross highlighted in the bottom right portion of the character used in the logo (阡). However, at an even deeper (and perhaps more meaningful level), this character is used as an alternate method of writing another sen (千), which means “1,000”. In the Christian faith, this number holds special significance because of its symbolic, ancient meaning of eternity and the millennial reign of Christ (which holds numerous interpretations among various theological schools of thought, but is nonetheless deemed of the utmost importance within Christianity).

We are very excited to share this new design with you, and we hope that you can grow to appreciate the meaning that it holds here at Beneath the Tangles!