About a month and a half ago, I started writing a blog post about Leena Snidate, the influential and talented Finnish designer who produced the now-iconic Heartbleed logo for Codenomicon in “just a couple hours.”

Heartbleed logo is free to use, rights waived via CC0.

And it’s a brilliant logo — vivid and emotionally resonant. It probably contributed to a lot of people becoming aware of the bug and taking steps to mitigate their risk.

You should check out the designer’s story. It’s pretty cool.

But something kept nagging me…

What struck me most was the irony of the events: graphic designer beautifully and evocatively illustrates one of the most serious security flaws yet to surface in the history of the Internet. That’s all she does. That is where her role begins and ends.

Visual imagery has enormous power. It jump-starts the emotions; conveys in a split second what might take hours to explain with words. We usually consider visual thinking to be primarily a tool for advertising or communications. But visual thinking is also a means for problem solving. It is creative, dynamic, and sequential. It is also one of the most powerful means to make the abstract concrete and comprehensible.

Art meeting code can mean much more than logos that describe software. Even beautiful, effective, high-impact logos. We want designers, artists, and students to know that more is possible.

In the coming weeks, we will be be sharing some examples of creative collaboration between the art and tech worlds that push boundaries and inspire us to build better tools to create and share. We are still accepting stories and examples — send to media@yesexactly.com.