I Tried to Design What Memory Loss Feels Like
Designing The Years Within — a visual identity shaped by brain aging, memory, and the changing sense of self
Before I had a logo, I had a question.
If memory changes, where do all our earlier selves go?
My background is in genetics. For three years, I studied brain aging, and my thesis focused on gene expression in this field. I kept returning to the same uncomfortable gap: research can describe what changes in the brain, but it cannot fully describe what those changes feel like from inside a life.
That gap became the beginning of The Years Within.
The project will become an animated love story informed by research on brain aging. The idea is to let the science enter through what the characters live — not as a lecture placed on top of the story. In later articles, I will write about the papers behind different parts of that world.
Before I could animate any of it, though, I needed a logo.
The first face of the project
This white-background version was where I started. It already had a woman’s profile, a vertical structure, a second presence, and a sense of division.
It held pieces of the idea, but not yet the whole feeling.
I knew what I did not want. A brain icon felt too literal. An old face would reduce aging to appearance. And a symbol of total disappearance felt wrong — both scientifically and emotionally.
That left me searching for a mark that could hold growth, memory, time, and a person without explaining them too neatly.
What the rejected directions taught me
I experimented in Zoviz, changing prompts and producing roughly ten directions. The same fragments kept returning: a woman, a divided face, a tree, leaves, time, and traces of an inner landscape.
One emphasized transformation, another duality, another the mind as a landscape. But I did not want two selves standing apart, and I did not want the tree to overpower the person.
The project was really about the uncertain path between the selves we have lived and the self we can still reach.
The image I could not forget
While I was working, I kept returning to William Utermohlen’s late self-portraits.
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Utermohlen continued making art after an Alzheimer’s diagnosis in 1995. At the suggestion of a nurse, he made self-portraits over the following years. According to the artist’s estate, he lost the ability to paint in 2000, although his final drawings date from 2002.
I do not see these portraits as scientific measurements of Alzheimer’s disease. I encountered them as artworks, and my reading of them is personal: the figure still seems present, while the route to a coherent image of the self appears harder to hold.
That interpretation helped me understand what I wanted the logo to say: identity does not simply disappear, but it can become harder to hold on to the story of who we are.
Once I understood that, I could judge the designs differently.
The final mark
I chose the direction I wanted and edited it inside Zoviz until it felt like mine. I adjusted it into the pale-blue version paired with the name The Years Within — the final identity shown at the beginning of this article. The generated options were the starting point; the final result came from what I changed and what I chose to keep.
It felt like The Years Within.
The circular icon below is a close view of the symbol at the center of that final lockup.
What the Mark Holds
The circle of the logo resembles a clock without hands, while the vertical line within it forms the trunk of the tree of life. On one side of the tree, the leaves represent the spring of life — youth, vitality, and a clear, recognizable sense of identity. As time passes, however, life moves toward autumn. The leaves fall one by one, much like memories and familiar traces of life gradually become harder to access in the mind of a person experiencing profound memory loss. Eventually, even one’s own sense of identity may begin to fade and feel unfamiliar — a concept inspired by the gradual erosion of facial recognition and self-representation in William Utermohlen’s self-portraits.
And yet, the circle remains. Time continues, and the person is still present within it, even as some of what once connected them to their past — and to themselves — begins to fade.
A Scientific Boundary
This logo represents brain aging, but aging is not the same as dementia or Alzheimer’s disease. The transition from spring to autumn symbolizes the passage of time and the increasing vulnerability of memory and identity — not the inevitable fate of every aging brain.
Why this version stayed
The final mark stayed because it does not close the question. It is not a medical diagram or a portrait of visible old age. It does not show one face simply replacing another. It holds presence and inaccessibility inside the same boundary.
The full identity is the pale-blue lockup shown at the beginning. I also wanted to know whether the form would survive when the color was stripped away or warmed up.
This mark will be the entrance to a larger world: an animated love story, future writing about brain-aging research, and my continuing attempt to translate biology into something that can be felt.
Making it taught me that the strongest symbol was not the one that explained everything. It was the one that preserved the question.
We do not leave the years behind. They remain within us, even when the path back to them begins to fade.
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If you want to explore creating and editing your own logo directions, you can try Zoviz.
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