Hey nichromat, glad you liked my article.

The one you are talking about is called 'Plymouth'. It is used in most (no sure in all) of the Linux distros. Customizing it is easy actually. All you need to do is find a theme you like, put it into plymouth's folder and set the theme as default. You can find a huge collection of Plymouth themes here.

In the "Feeling Hacky" subsection above, the commands just disable Plymouth altogether, and that's why you don't see the logo anymore.