I like the leaf and color how it is now!
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I don’t think any design philosophy stays mainstream forever, as current trends are now attempting to find the midway point between skeuomorphism and flat design. Microsoft’s Fluent Design System for example attempts to combine elements of Aero and Microsoft Design Language (read: legally-not-Metro). Last couple releases of macOS have also begun introducing non-flat UX elements as well.
These design trends may be driven in part due to fully flat design being an accessibility hindrance for some people, such as according to this study:
Funny thing is, Haiku’s Flat style isn’t actually completely flat and avoids many of the usability pitfalls of most flat designs.
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It is a matter of fact the “world” deemed skeumorphism not suitable and moved away from it.
Flat-ish started to be all over the places: websites, UI, industrial design, and more.
It is also my opinion indeed, but it is irrelevant for the sake of this discussion.
To be honest, none of the attempts from Microsoft, Apple and Google were completely flat. The presence of drop shadows for example make the design slightly skeumorphic but there’s a huge difference between the two ends of the spectrum.
Anyway, going back on topic, my two cents for the logo: I like @Lrrr‘s take on this. Way better the the leaf. But if the leaf has to stay I would make it flat in two flavours suitable for both light and dark themes, IMHO.
I love this idea!
If you change the Deskbar color, the leaf is static and doesn’t adapt to the color. So if it’s a shade of blue, the leaf is blue. If it’s a shade of black, the leaf is blue. And so on, it doesn’t change, and it clashes with the colors. The default light gray and a dark gray work alright, but other colors don’t match well with it.
Far as following the background, I suppose if Haiku had compositing, I could see an alpha blended, glassy leaf that could intelligently ‘pick up’ on the color like modern macOS and Windows versions do. But that’d take a lot to implement; it’d be easier to just have a theme chooser, an accent color preference for it, or a gradient option in the color palette in Appearance to set it.
Well… it takes a lot to humbly confess it to everyone – but um, nothing proves me more wrong than actually visualizing what my various ideas would look like (different mockups done with a hi-DPI Deskbar).
The first mockup candidate is with the isometric Haiku ‘H’ logo, which I gotta confess doesn’t look too awful bad compared to the other ones! The 2.5D design fits well with the Haiku look and feel… but this logo variant isn’t really used, and so it clashes in its own way. But – I’ll say one thing I noticed! The black outline fits with the light tone here, and the white works on dark colors… so seeing this gets a mixed review for me with positives and negatives.
Second one is a scaled down HAIKU logo, which would look something like this. Negatives first are the space, readability, and you’d need a black and white version for dark and light modes implemented, because an outline around the letters doesn’t scale down well at small sizes. Positives are that it’s definitely official – it is the Haiku logo, it tells anyone seeing a screenshot instantly what this is, and it matches AboutSystem, Installer, and documentation. And it’s wide enough it doesn’t feel like it’s out of place.
A mostly negative self-review I’d give would be to the maple leaf idea – while it matches the startup disk and some of the emojis and what not like I’d said earlier, it’s too small. And it’s kinda ugly (at least to me) and doesn’t match (in fact visually clashes with) the isometric feel of every desktop applet and app icon.
And… now we start descending into the autumn foilage… and this one is a contender for the worst one. Going with an orange leaf is… just bad. Somehow in my head it looked better. I have nothing good to say about it. And I have tried making the outline thinner, thicker, darker, lighter, and played with the gradient… the orange just doesn’t vibe with me. In the end I just left it with this half-baked ugly version, but I don’t like it.
Which led me to try a black leaf, which is left with a thick border here – but even without one, I can say it just feels too imposing. It’s too big, unlike the little tiny apple in the Mac’s Menubar (when in light mode; in dark, it’s white). Honestly, the first image in my mind of it (maybe because of the curves and stem) looks like a leftover banana that’s went bad. For real, I could show different variations to everyone (like thin or no outlines) and no matter how, it still looks like a dark, ugly shadow.
That led to lightening the leaf a bit to a gray gradient, and this one works a bit better I think, but… sigh, it makes the menu feel like it’s inactive and the look just doesn’t sit well with me. But honestly, I think with some more love, focus, and tweaks to it, this might work like the ‘graphite’ Apple logo did in old Mac OS X versions. But I’d have to mess with it to get it to that point.
The final non-blue version I messed with was a silvery leaf reminiscient of the silvery Apple logo that iOS used to have. And honestly, like the H logo, I kinda like this one. It’d need more fine tuning to get looking nicer, but it fits both in a light and dark environment.
Finally, we get back to the blue leaf – and this is what I wish would happen to it if it stays – please align it with the Deskbar! The current version sinks below the button and it takes away from the polish of the OS experience.
So what are the takeaways of the mockup experience I’ve been bold enough to share in public? 
My personal favorites are:
- Full Haiku logo – it just makes sense as it fits all system branding and would increase brand recognition, (although it has it’s drawbacks I’d mentioned, and needs a dark and light version).
- Isometric H – it matches the style of all the system icons, it’s simple, and it matches light and dark themes.
- Graphite/silver leaf – with more work to them, I feel these would be a good alternate that would replace the traditional blue one.
All my other ideas I’ve proposed (and tried to make mockups of here) I personally would throw into the trash.
But – please, if I could kindly suggest to align the leaf so it’s not sinking below the line Gnome 3.0 style (as shown in the screenshot above), and allow users to change the color of the leaf by making gradient options available to Appearance preferences, maybe just that would solve the problem.
Anyways, hope everyone liked seeing me try the mockups and this idea; it’s fun to read what everyone’s thoughts on this are.
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The „Sinking“ is deliberate branding, not a bug in deskbar
I agree with the contrast issues however, that should be fixed.
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I also vote for not changing anything. The blue leaf looks good, it is distinctive from other elements in the ui yet remains in the general branding (which the maple leaf or 3d logo don’t), and it is not “someone just slapped the project logo in there for no reason” (this is not an advertising placement, it’s a menu icon…).
Basically, everything about it (including the off-center placement) is intentional, and I don’t think it is going away.
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In my opinion, the “Sinking” leaf looks good only as a background item, as in those screenshots, and does not look good in the foreground, as in the Deskbar.
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It is in the background of the button, if you compare all the other versions with a pronounced icon it becomes much more noisy, and is harder to figure out what you should click on.
I mean behind other things when I say “in the background”.
I take it back, anyway - I changed background to a restful deep green, and the blue leaf looks even better now! Maybe the match with the background color doesn’t really help a bit. Anyway, I think we have a winner: the way it is.
Indeed the blue can clash but any fixed colour will do. It all depends of background menu colour chosen by the user and the orange one would have certainly looked better if you had tried it with one of the dark theme around. So, I’d say give the choice between blue, orange and green original colours and maybe add the silver one. This way, it would stay the same Haiku recognizable design but, you can avoid the clash.
I prefer the ones that actually say ‘Haiku’ on them, even just capital letters in black, on a light grey background, wouldn’t clash with desktop background colours - a definite improvement over that blue ‘leaf’ logo…
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For me it looks not better on imgur… So depends on the monitors resolution, then!
Anyway, having the HAIKU-Logo this way is for now, might be the easiest good-looking solution for now!
Some of us would like to know which files to edit, and use the logo what we like!
EDIT: The HAIKU Logo should look like everywhere the same.
And the HAIKU Leaf-only is not a Logo at all!
This one with the leaf would be nice too:
Should be looked at ca. 100%:
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Both can be disasters, at least Skeuomorphism gives us some cool looking apps even if their utility is not ideal they typically have good discoverability, because they resemble a physical object we’ve used before or have at least seen someone use.
That said non-flat designs aren’t inherently Skeuomorphism … eg windows 9x largely isn’t Skeuomorphic and neither is XP at least when compared with typical poster child Skeuomorphic designs… which evoke thoughts of tube amps and woodgrain shelves… which are silly to have on a PC. Windows Bob… now that is bad Skeuomorphism.
You could think of Skeuomorphism’s fall as the first death of VR lol… I think there will be a VR crash eventually where people eventually realize it kinda sucks compared to just using a PC normally or it has its place for a few niche uses.
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typical poster child Skeuomorphic designs… which evoke thoughts of tube amps and woodgrain shelves… which are silly to have on a PC
Bread and butter of VSTs. Skeuomorphism is still wildly popular in audio software.
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Until that object fades into history. We’ve all seen a version of this:
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I know this will sound pessimistic, but I’ll say outright this is a problem with Haiku tbh. No one wants to risk trying anything new.
We had wallpaper and sound contests that went nowhere, we’ve had mobile discussions that went nowhere; the truth is, I left for a while because I got discouraged and tired of hoping Haiku would start seeing itself as a serious Linux competitor… and honestly, as long as it looks the same as alpha1 and before that, BeOS R5 forever, it takes away from that goal. I know the whole community will shut pretty much any idea down faster than a rogue program in the Tron series, so why try anymore?
tbh I don’t really care the leaf stays blue if that’s how everyone wants it (and I saw most of my ideas were ugly and sucked anyway) but I do wish at least the alignment on it could be fixed only to be told that’s a ‘feature’.
I truly, sincerely, deeply hope someone out there realizes Haiku is one of the last options in the entire world left to take on the monopoly of Linux in open source. The BSDs and illumos are far smaller, ReactOS is nowhere near complete at a stage I’d compare to Windows Whistler in 2024, and I truly say all this because I believe little Haiku even in beta stage has a chance. We must defeat Linux. And someone reading this might ask how to achieve this goal, and my answer is to support the developer team — and accept new ideas, (not necessarily this one), but those from the user community like the contests that were held for nothing.
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Well you tried, Andrew. But they aren’t very receptive are they? People who like computer code aren’t known for their aesthetic sensibilities are they? Their own personal style is a giveaway.
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Well… I wouldn’t devolve anything into personal attacks either, the developers are awesome people and keep this project going (and I do maintain a belief Haiku is a beacon of hope in a Linux-dominated space), and the user base is committed in a way I’d say that rivals Apple’s fan base, even though I think it by majority wants things to be like R5 forever. And I can say even though I don’t write anything for Haiku itself, I do love software as well 