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Anyone who's received a greeting card or seen one of my drawings is likely to have seen a signature that isn't quite a signature: there are three lines and two circles, arranged just so. Where did this "signature" come from? Well, that particular story goes back a few years and then a few more, all the way back to high school...
My family was the average nuclear family with Mom and Dad and 2.4 children, except that the extra 0.4 of a child gave my sister the heebie jeebies so we had to trade it in for a 31" TV. Like any other family, though, we would have to leave notes for one another for missed phone calls or chores to be done or whatever else might come up. Of course, it was a given that we'd sign our notes.
In a traditional Chinese family, family members do not generally refer to each other by their given names. (The rules are actually far more complicated than that, but this simplification will suffice for now.) In addressing one another, it is more common to use relational titles rather than given names. If we had been a typical Western family in Canada, I might have called the others of my family "Mom", "Dad", and "Sheree". As it was and still is, we called each other "Mother", "Father", "Big Brother", and "Little Sister".
At first I started by signing my notes with a "big brother" character in Chinese that was hand printed in block letters. As time progressed, the boxes became circles out of laziness. That progressed further with the melding of the vertical lines, the loss of the tailhook, and a greater flourish on the horizontal lines.
That's how my sigil developed.