[Advocacy] Some Variations On A Vorbis Logo

Monty xiphmont at xiph.org
Fri Mar 18 14:08:42 PST 2005




On Fri, Mar 18, 2005 at 09:15:47AM +0000, Daniel James wrote:
> That's true, but they were only a starting point. It's difficult to 
> produce a truly original logo.
> 
> I hope that when the new logos are published, Xiph will accept some 
> constructive criticism on their suitability for hardware branding.

We hired a professional visual designer who's worked in this area for
some time.  Thusfar, I'm pleased with her work as are the other core
Xiph folks.

Part of the reason we went out and hired a designer is that we get
quite a few user submissions of various branding, logo and wordmark
attempts, and frankly, the quality is universally pretty low.
Something in the geek nature feels it has mastered visual design at
the point it feels comfortable with the mechanics of Photoshop or
Gimp.  I don't mean to discourage or sound elitist, but 9 times out of
10, I have to come up with new and more diplomatic ways of saying
'Ugh, God, please, no.  Thank you.' There are plenty of people on
Slashdot who are convinced they have something to contribute, and will
be offended when we don't take their 'good advice' or 'obvious
improvements'.  Some of these folks are frothing so hard it's funny.

Remember the tag name wars?  People were refusing to talk to each
other they got so pissed off over something so utterly inconsequential
and the various proposals floating around were thoroughly impractical.
The logos actually matter quite alot in comparison and I'm a
perfectionist, so you better believe I'm going to at least own this
task myself.

So, I don't want to sound ungrateful, but I also want to be honest.  I
didn't solicit input because, in this case, I don't want much input.
That doesn't mean submissions are unwelcome, just that I'm unlikely to
use them or probably even comment.  If something came in that was
obviously superior to what we're getting from the designer, I'd use
it.

I will mention that the new branding is derived from user submitted
designs over the past N years that were ideas we all liked.  Thusfar
the only element of any of the wordmarks, logos or branding that
didn't originally come from a user submission is [well, will be] the
Flac Frog.

I have more specific objections to the last batch of logos submitted,
but I don't think there's much value to getting into that.

Monty


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