I wanted the pyjs logo to behave like text. Peter Bittner had suggested putting the site’s design resources into a font. Then we could style the logo with CSS, along with the rest of the writing.
Alessandro D’Aquino had drawn the original concept: a python curling into JavaScript braces. I tried variations in GIMP using Pincoyablack, a font his design reminded me of. My first attempt cramped the braces, so I spread things out. Later I reworked his SVG by hand, with a little Python program to help. The path definition survives, including its credit to Alessandro.
Making a whole font from scratch was taking too long. I used Raleway, which Alessandro had suggested for the site, and added the logo at U+EE00. The OpenType font was the original; Font Squirrel generated the other formats. The demo used text shadows, bold, and italics. Bold nearly closed the snake’s eye, but it was a real glyph.
Then I opened the demo at work and got boxes where the logo should have been. I suspected it had worked at home because I had the fonts installed locally. Lex Berezhny could see it on his Droid Razr, which helped narrow the problem: some formats worked and some did not.
During conversion I had stripped out everything except Western-language glyphs. The WOFF file was definitely affected. My new character was gone. I corrected the exports and republished them.