How the EA symbol came about is really kind of interesting. I knew
that we needed something nifty, but the preliminary designs created for
this just didn't do it for me. So I sat down with the graphics designer,
and we started sketching stuff out. At this point we were looking mainly
for the right silhouette. Circle was out; oval was too soft; triangle
was too Trek. At one point he did a star variation. I looked at it, and
somewhere in my head the right configuration was there, so I started to
erase the points of the star, round them off, filled out the middle (and
if you've ever seen me draw, it's a scary thing; I should stick to
writing).

I knew the shape was right when I'd finished, but I knew there was
still something missing. That night, the designer called and said he'd
been looking at it again, and he suddenly noticed that what we'd done was
to put a silhouette E over a silhouette A, and when he sketched in the
inner horizontal bars, tucked in the corner of the feet on the A, it
came together perfectly.

My problem is often that I can see what I want in my head, but I'm
limited on actually drawing it. When we were doing the prosthetic design
for the pilot for Delenn, our prosthetic designer hit a wall on the
headbone section, finally threw up his hands and didn't know what to do
with the thing. I went over to the studio, we talked for a while, I
couldn't quite communicate what was in my head, so I grabbed one of the
sticks they use to shape the clay and started re-shaping the back and
sides of the crest. (He'd had them going straight down; I started to
curve them, and hollow them out, making them more shell-like.) By the
time we were done, we had it worked out.

Which is really part of the fun in doing your own series; you get to
stick your nose into parts of the production that normally you'd never get
near, and do your best to screw it up, because that's what bosses do.
I'm directly involved in costume approval, prosthetics, EFX, production
design approval, everything. (On a couple of occasions I've sketched out
what I had in mind for costumes, much to the amusement of our costume
designer, because they look like something a 5-year old would draw. A
drunk 5-year old, actually. But they communicate the silhouette, and
that's the important thing, despite the fact that she's keeping the
sketches for blackmail.)

jms