SBCL Logo Proposals

[Nicolas Hafner]

I've written about this a few times on the #sbcl IRC channel, but I thought for a more lasting discussion of how to actually go about this, a bug ticket might be more appropriate.

Now, I've been trying to come up with a logo for the SBCL project and have made a few proposals for that as well. Designing and choosing a logo however is a difficult problem as it is inherently something that relies heavily on personal taste. Nevertheless, the proposals I have made so far all follow these principles:

1. They are minimalistic in nature
   This ensures that the logo is easily distinguishable and still visible at small sizes.

2. They use very few colours, preferably even just one.
   This goes into the simplicity aspect as well, but it also makes sure that the logo can still stand out even if it is used on differently-coloured backgrounds. A single colour gives the added benefit of allowing you to use it in a font and changing the colour of it as necessary.

3. They are all vector images
   Vector images can scale to arbitrary sizes without loss of quality, and are very small in terms of file size, which is important for websites. Furthermore, vector graphics allow easy adaptation and modification in the future, should changes be necessary.

4. They should have a unique look
   This is another factor for the "distinguishable" part. A strong logo doesn't necessarily have to represent anything about the project in particular, but it does have to be recognisable easily.

These principles also rule out a wide range of ideas as they would be too complicated to represent, confusing, misleading, or too similar to existing designs.

You can view the designs I've created so far on the following page:

  https://shinmera.github.io/sbcl-logo/

There you can also change the background and foreground to see if you prefer a particular colour or if it still works with a different surrounding colour.

One thing that I still don't really have much of an idea about is how a final candidate would be picked and rolled out. I don't know if there is anyone that "calls the shots" as it were, as I'm not sure that a complete consensus could be reached for something like this.

I'm open to suggestions for both improvements to the existing designs, and completely new ideas.

[Attila Lendvai (attila-lendvai)]

random logo idea: visually blend into one image two parens (), and a snake. the snake would be biting its own tail, and the two parens would be part of the snake's body.