From: Karl von Laudermann <doodpants@...>
Date: 2005-05-11T22:40:31+09:00
Subject: Re: Redesign 2005, Round Two

Jason Foreman wrote:
>
> Yea, I am not a fan of that logo either.  I personally like Michel
> Martens' version that looks like a red square with a thick red border
> and the top-right corner is hacked off to give a sort of silhouette
of
> a ruby.  Not that John's isn't a lovely image however.

I like the gem logo. The square logo that you like looks sterile and
corporate to me. The site mockup that uses it doesn't look like the
home page of an open source programming language with a vibrant user
community; it looks like the corporate web page of RubySoft, Inc.

> > John's image would also be a difficult one to reproduce nicely on
> anything other than a computer screen, or at smaller sizes.  It's got
> that distinct Photoshop'd look to it.

Huh? What would you try to reproduce the image on, where it wouldn't
start out as a Photoshop file anyway? You want it on a piece of paper?
Print it out. You want it on a T-shirt or banner? Send the Photoshop
file to a print shop. The logo is all geometric shapes and gradient
fills. There's no reason the source image can't be vector-based instead
of pixel-based, and thus nicely scalable.

Check out some of the icons/logos/emblems/whatever used at the top of
these other open source project web pages. None of them are flat,
simple geometric shapes, and I'm sure they've all been
reproduced on T-shirts and trade show banners.
http://www.freebsd.org/
http://www.linux.org/
http://www.gimp.org/
http://www.opendarwin.org/