While looking for a name for a watch, I went down a Google Images rabbit hole. When you look up watches, you get high-end timepieces or smartwatches. I came across a picture of multiple time zone clocks, which reminded me of the world clock. I don’t work on the flight line anymore, but I thought about the world clocks we had in the operations offices I’ve worked in. Greenwich Mean Time, aka Zulu Time Zone, is how the FAA and military airlift operations synchronize our flying schedule so everyone is on the same sheet of music worldwide. It’s perfect zero as time goes by. I did an internal search of my photos for world clocks for inspiration and found a picture of one of the world clocks we used to use. The word “ZULU” always looked cool on the board, so I chose that name.

I wanted to combine the letters “z” and “t” for the logo. Naturally, with time in the name, I wanted to incorporate an hourglass into the logo. I initially drew out a few logo versions before searching for inspiration. My first working copy of the logo used the “z” as the outline of the hourglass and the “t” as the sand trickling down. It looked good but too ridged. I decided to give the logo a more fluid look. The illustrator did most of the heavy lifting in making the logo look exactly how I wanted it to.