When I was hired to work on the Ohio.com website for the Akron Beacon Journal, the site was still very basic (those were the earliest days of the internet, after all). So, one of the first things I did was create a logo that could be used in both the newspaper and online.

I crafted the whole "Ohio.com" name to have the same curves as the "dot" in the middle ("dot coms" were a big deal back then and having "ohio.com" was quite the score). The "O" was used on its own in many places on the site and in the newspaper. (I'd also made a rotating "O" animated GIF version, but that's been lost to time.)

I'm not certain whether or not anyone had used the Ohio state shape within the "O" in Ohio before me, but we owned it for years. Now, it's no longer on the site but I periodically see a red "Ohio" with the white state cutout used around the state.

Excuse the size and quality ... web resolutions were very low back then and graphics often had to be "optimized for web" and reduced in size to help speed up load times.