The Design that Collapsed Time

The Beginning

When I set out to design the logo for ARDENT-SPACE, I wanted something elemental. A symbol stripped to its essence, reflecting the idea of habitation. Out of the many sketches on my desk, one struck me instantly: a simple rectangle with an opening. Stark. Minimal. Archaic. Pure.

It felt inevitable. This was the house reduced to its core. A few tweaks were needed so the name could merge with the form, but the heart of the design remained – a rectangle with an opening.

After years of creative work, I knew this moment: the sudden click of recognition. The form that feels both personal and universal. I trusted it, as I always do.

The logo was done. Defined. Established. Or so I thought.

The Discovery

Then, one evening, everything changed. I had a documentary about Egyptian hieroglyphs playing in the background – something I expected to be dry, almost boring. But suddenly, I froze.

On the screen was the exact same symbol I had just created – only carved in stone.

My breath caught. My logo was there, on a wall thousands of years older than me. I leaned forward, electrified. Surely this was a mistake, a coincidence? But no – this was no artifact of chance. It was genuine. The glyph was called pr. And its meaning? House.

I was speechless.

The House that Became a Letter

The story didn’t end there. The little house wasn’t bound to Egypt. It traveled.

Phoenician traders, working in Egypt, carried more than goods back home – they carried symbols. Among them was the house glyph, pr. They tilted it upright, simplified it, and called it bēt. It still meant “house.”From there it entered Greece, as beta. Then Rome, as B.

Think about that. The letter B you are reading right now, began its life as a symbol for shelter. Every time we write it, we echo a house that once stood, then became a symbol for home, and finally slipped quietly into the alphabet itself.

The letter B, so familiar it feels weightless, is actually a fossil of architecture. A shelter in stone, a shelter in script.

The Revelation

Unlike the decorative hieroglyphs – the bird, the snake, the sun – pr is different. It is architectural. Abstract. Minimal.

It could almost have been drawn by a Bauhaus designer. Its austere geometry feels timeless.

How could something so stark, so modern, have been born in antiquity? My hand, the scribe’s hand – both drawing the same house for the same reason, unknowing, 5,000 years apart.

It felt like arriving at the same conclusion as someone across a time tunnel.

What I thought was invention, was in truth rediscovery. A design so distilled it had skipped centuries of ornament, surviving unchanged, still fresh today. By intuition alone, I had stepped into the same symbolic language as the ancients.

Closing Reflection

Our ancestors were far more modern than we imagine. My logo turned out to be not just a brand mark, but a key – unlocking a hidden continuity between my design and the first scribes of civilisation.

Perhaps this is the deeper truth: there is an archaic language of symbols carved not just in stone, but in us. A shared symbolic DNA, that leaps across time and that we are all connected to.

A doorway across 5,000 years.