[Arm-netbook] Logos

John Luke Gibson eaterjolly at gmail.com
Thu Jan 26 07:04:56 GMT 2017


I would highly recommend avoiding any logos, without proper historical
reference. One of the problems with traditional Linux icons, are that
they are very un-iconic. It's better to be textually based, in my
opinion, than to use disorienting imagery. At this point, most of the
clay has already set so referencing/alluding-to other gnu projects
[such as blender] wouldn't be detrimental, however ascii has a very
richer history of use by "hacktivists".

Referencing some historically relevant (to "hacktivism") ascii
iconography either overtly or subtly, kindof more or less as a hat tip
to communities which support said historical events will cause the
logo a greater likelihood of being regarded as iconic. I wish I had
specific examples, but possibly using cloister black font would be a
subtle hat tip to anonymous for some individuals use of various
letters in that font as copy-cat of L from Death Note.

Another thing of note, would be that we need to be careful who we tip
our hats to, to be careful of who in the future people might assume us
to endorse. A font is innocuous enough, that it can be adapted later
due to circumstance (should a need arise to disassociate) without
damaging the recognize-ability of any logo.

The universal and modular style of blender, is a good point to mimic.
A solid dot in the center of the "O" would probably be a subtle enough
correlation to the blender logo.

This is the pattern of thinking we need in developing logos and "slogans".

Thinking about what sounds catchy only correlates us with random
corporate culture. We don't need to be entirely original as we have a
history to fall back on. However originality might also help
distinguish us from our predecessors, the last thing we want is to
fail to distinguish ourselves from your neighborhood corporation.

I would recommend Luke to contact Wenqing Yang a.k.a. "Yummei", using
the notability of the project to attract their attention. I would like
to point out that despite being a cultural figure (famous artist) in
the hacktivist community they previously lauched a multi-million
dollar successful indiegogo which caused them much heart ache (per
their blog) over legal controversy with so-called partners and their
personal admonishment that they failed to do enough.

>From: Alexander Ross <maillist_arm-netbook at aross.me>
>To: Linux on small ARM machines <arm-netbook at lists.phcomp.co.uk>
>Cc:
>Date: Wed, 25 Jan 2017 16:07:15 +0000
>Subject: Re: [Arm-netbook] Logos
>this all these efforts, got me to have a play around too. :)
>
> i was started having a go at one idea of letters inserting into each
> other kinda like a module.
>
> I had put E and O in side the M. it then kinda looked like/spelled Meoo
> like a cat.
> So what about a darn cat logo? maybe a cat playing with a eoma68 card in
> its paws?
>
> sry for the yet another internet cat image type of suggestion, never
> thought id be making one heh.



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