MY FIRST DESIGN for this Christmas card wasn't too successful, mostly because nobody got the joke! In doing the TMS web site I work with the stylized 'brot logo all the time and it's easy to forget that most people don't even recognise that as a Mandelbrot Set, let alone a further stylized version of it.

Remember the original holly picture? I started by chopping out a different leaf that was vaguely reminiscent of the Mandelbrot logo. (There was also one that looked rather like the Virgin Mary, but I decided that would be in poor taste.)

To make the leaf look more like the TMS logo I used Painter's Liquid Lens plug-in floater to distort it into a highly cariacatured spiky leaf. Then I corrected its bent neck and added a shadow to make it look more three-dimensional.

Ultimately it was decided that this was far too obtuse for the Christmas card, but the hollybrot did make an appearance on the home page of the web site, as part of the festive banner.

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