Hi,
Well it was a minor mistake to forgot one option that turns out to be the most popular in the vote. Mistakes happens, and now it has been fixed.
I’m fine with community people contributing things, the question is more, how do we decide what to include? I think a simple rule is that the new thing has to be better than the existing thing. Judging from the vote results, in this thread, this was not the case.
There were also some interesting discussions about this in the Google Code-In general mailing list (as Google Code-In had a “design” category and several projects had a difficult time mentoring these tasks correctly). Basically the reasoning was something like this: if you want a new logo, first, you need to know what’s wrong with the existing logo, and clearly explain your problem. This works just like code: imagine someone submits a patch that rewrites some function. You ask them: “what are you fixing exactly?” and they say “I don’t know, I just think my code looks nicer”. What do you think? Is “nicer” code (a very subjective thing) ok to integrate? What if it introduces bugs and regressions?
Just like programming, graphics design is a difficult task. And it needs to start with a problem to solve. And once we have defined the problem to solve, I don’t see why we would turn to contests, instead of the traditional process of having one person make a submission, and then we iterate on it until we are happy with the result. Exactly what happened with our current logo in Installer: the original logo was designed by stubear, then reworked by stippi (adding gradients and shadows, slightly tweaking the font for better matching to the pixel grid and more even spacing), then by mmadia (the beta stamp, and the bugs under the leaves), and slightly touched by me in some cases (I removed the “glow” under the white-on-black logo).
So, ok, maybe that beta stamp is a bit “in-your-face” and not very subtle, especially in that bright red color. That was kind of the point when it was introduced, that was for the first alpha version of Haiku and at the time we wanted to be very clear that this was work in progress. So it was kind of our big yellow “roadwork in progress, drive carefully” sign. Maybe now with betas it is time to revisit this.
But, as you can see, this was not really stated in this thread, and as a result, a lot of the submissions went in completely different directions, defacing the logo and completely ignoring our trademark guidelines.
But now that we have a clearer idea what the problem is with the existing logo and why we may want to change it, maybe we can think about it more constructively. There may be other ways to convey the current “work in progress” state of Haiku. For example, what about having part of the logo itself look unfinished, with “sketch lines”?
Some example of what I mean here:
And maybe the darkmode version could use a blueprint look?
(do not directly reuse these images, I picked random things from Internet for example here and they are not appropriately licensed)
Now, doing that is probably a bit more work than the submissions we got here. But I think it could make sense, and maybe even be declined into a wallpaper for the beta releases, ensuring some kind of consistency in the whole Haiku theming.
Then, we can debate if we want to reinforce this “work-in-progress” looks and aesthetics. Is that the way to go? Or should we try to look more complete and finished instead?
