Arch Linux logo concept

foxbunny · 2007-10-26 13:05:16

cerise, you were hiding some excellent stuff! Great job!

http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php? … 66#p293266

cerise · 2007-10-26 13:52:24

foxbunny wrote:

cerise, you were hiding some excellent stuff! Great job!

Now you know what I do for a living. I've been staring at the current logo for a while thinking at how it would 'evolve.' The submission is my idea of an evolution of the design, keeping the same blue-hue and using perfect hyperbolic curves to symbolise both structural arches as well as a triangular approach showing strength, prominence, and other 'arch' qualities (like in the example of an arch-angel.) I essentially took the current arches and just bent them (blue & black) and replicated them (black) to make an evolved logo.

simple colors, simple structures, simply the best distribution... free your computer.

foxbunny · 2007-10-26 14:43:24

Nice. We now have three persons in Arch Community registered to design stuff for a living.

Two of them registered on this BBS at more or less the same time, too.

Last edited by foxbunny (2007-10-26 14:44:04)

cerise · 2007-10-26 14:50:05

foxbunny wrote:

Nice. We now have three persons in Arch Community registered to design stuff for a living.

Do you write code as well? I've been in the design biz and code biz for a long time now. (probably too long!)

foxbunny wrote:

Two of them registered on this BBS at more or less the same time, too.

LOL that is funny! October is the design month!

Cerebral · 2007-10-26 14:53:54

foxbunny wrote:

Nice. We now have three persons in Arch Community registered to design stuff for a living.

Three? Yourself, cerise, and... thayer? I thought thayer was just a hobbyist in graphic design?

foxbunny · 2007-10-26 14:54:32

@cerise

Hm, now that you mention it, yeah. October is a month of design. No wonder we're changing logos.

I actually like coding, but never have enough time for it. I see you code in RoR, which is my favorite language! Meanwhile, I'm working in design world for last three or four years. Some prepress experience, and mostly print-related design. Graphical identity and PR is my favourite, though, so I chose a job in a marketing department of one of the magazine publishers. Not too rewarding working for someone else, but, hey, "it's a living".

BTW, are you schooled in design, or self-taught? Just curious...

Last edited by foxbunny (2007-10-26 14:58:42)

foxbunny · 2007-10-26 14:55:50

Cerebral wrote:

I thought thayer was just a hobbyist in graphic design?

Oh? Then down to two registered.

Anyone else doing pro design? There's gotta be more...

cerise · 2007-10-26 15:02:36

foxbunny wrote:

@cerise
Hm, now that you mention it, yeah. October is a month of design. No wonder we're changing logos.
I actually like coding, but never have enough time for it. I see you code in RoR, which is my favorite language! Meanwhile, I'm working in design world for last three or four years. Some prepress experience, and mostly print-related design. Graphical identity and PR is my favourite, though, so I chose a job in a marketing department of one of the magazine publishers. Not too rewarding working for someone else, but, hey, "it's a living".

Ruby is my very favourite language right now (after over a decade, I finally stuck with one for more than two years!) GI and PR are great fields for design, I started out in both ages (over a decade, again) ago. I switched to brand identity and design work-flow when I started teaching and those have been my areas of specialisation since. Good to see another linux user in the biz!

(schooled)

Last edited by cerise (2007-10-26 15:03:24)

foxbunny · 2007-10-26 15:14:21

Yeah, not too many pros using Linux, especially in med-to-high-profile jobs.

I asked about schooling because I see more self-taught designers than schooled ones in the Linux world. Which is probably even close to logical. I myself am self-taught, although I did go to the Belgrade Academy of Applied Arts for a year (where I realized I had nothing to learn bacause of the outdated programme), but started working and speding all my earnings on books about design.

Two questions:

1. Have you considered designing a font for Arch Linux?
2. Would you help me with copy on the posters? (I'm a good writer but English is not my native.)

cerise · 2007-10-26 15:34:23

foxbunny wrote:

Yeah, not too many pros using Linux, especially in med-to-high-profile jobs.
I asked about schooling because I see more self-taught designers than schooled ones in the Linux world. Which is probably even close to logical. I myself am self-taught, although I did go to the Belgrade Academy of Applied Arts for a year (where I realized I had nothing to learn bacause of the outdated programme), but started working and speding all my earnings on books about design.
Two questions:
1. Have you considered designing a font for Arch Linux?
2. Would you help me with copy on the posters? (I'm a good writer but English is not my native.)

The trick to being pro in linux is knowing the prepress industry -- so that you can compensate for any lack of formats, colours, etc.

1. Yes, I actually have glyph edits in mind for a font, made specifically for arch. Time is what I don't have. T-shirts, bags, posters, cd/dvd media, packaging, promotional items, swag, icons, etc. are the things I do often enough to add arch into my daily work load.

2. The copy text on the posters -- as in why people should try arch / why it's the best? I'm more than happy to help -- I was waiting to make posters with copy until the developers said what kind of ideas they'd like to see represented. (I was going for more of the 'movie poster' feel currently.)

thayer · 2007-10-26 15:36:00

Technically, aren't we all hobbyist until we have a degree in something? I'm working towards my CIS/Comp Sci degree atm... I consider myself more developer than designer though, because I enjoy working with xhtml, css and php a lot more than photoshop and illustrator. That being said, I've been using photoshop and macromedia studio for years.

I believe strongly in 'function over form' and 'less is more'.

foxbunny · 2007-10-26 15:48:04

Basically, I think we are all hobbyist until our lives start to depend on what we do, revolve around it... when things we do become central to both ourselves and our survival. As I said before, your work is of high quality, and being a pro or hobbyist doesn't matter as far as that goes.

An interesting thing about pros in Linux world is that they are willing to sacrifice the stability of their workflow, and therefore their survival in order to use whatever FLOSS tools they like. I have switched to a Linux-based DTP workflow, which is a painful transistion, because you absolutely (1) depend on a smaller team of developers keeping their eyes open for bugs and patches, (2) you have no way of preflighting the PDFs, which means you again rely on developers to produce high-quality PDFs with no way of tweaking the output, at least at the moment. Both paid off, fortunately, but meanwhile I almost lost one client due to inmaturity of the tools I used, and (admittedly) lack of knowledge about PDFs in general.

cerise wrote:

The trick to being pro in linux is knowing the prepress industry -- so that you can compensate for any lack of formats, colours, etc.

When I feel a bit adventurous, I usually say that the trick to being pro in Linux is pushing the open standards. But yes, I agree wiht you. Would also add specs. Most linux software is built according to specs unlike many commercial tools (Quark's poor PDF output comes to mind), and if you know the specs, your output becomes more predictable. That is a lesson I learned the hard way, when I had to redo an entire catalogue from ground up in InDesign, after rendering a non-usable PDF in Scribus because of poor understanding of the PDF specs.

@devs, travis, thayer, cerise
Is there a possibility that the three most vocal community members here (glances at thayer, cerise), including myself plus the designer of a winning logo, and newsletter authors, be nominated as the dedicated PR team for Arch Linux? If we can agree there should be such an unit within the Arch Community, we could discuss the details of what such a team would do for Arch and post a guideline/proposal in the Arch Wiki for devs to review and decide.

@cerise
Can we see the work in progress, or you always wait until the last minute to reveal the work? (the Font, I mean)

Last edited by foxbunny (2007-10-26 15:56:51)

cerise · 2007-10-26 16:07:46

foxbunny wrote:

When I feel a bit adventurous, I usually say that the trick to being pro in Linux is pushing the open standards. But yes, I agree wiht you. Would also ad specs. Most linux software is built according to specs unlike many commercial tools, and if you know the specs, your output becomes more predictable. That is a lesson I learned the hard way, when I had to redo an entire catalogue from ground up in InDesign, after rendering a non-usable PDF in Scribus because of poor understanding of the PDF specs.

PDF is a great format for designs and designers, but not always so great for developers and programmers. Learning the format (today) is worth the pains, if for no other reason than most places will accept a pdf, regardless of how it was created (which isn't true for places that only accept word formats.)

foxbunny wrote:

@devs, travis, thayer, cerise
Is there a possibility that the three most vocal community members here (glances at thayer, cerise), including myself plus the designer of a winning logo, and newsletter authors, be nominated as the dedicated PR team for Arch Linux? If we can agree there should be such an unit within the Arch Community, we could discuss the details of what such a team would do for Arch and post a guideline/proposal in the Arch Wiki for devs to review and decide.

I'm not a very outspoken member unless I've got something to say or show, with that being said however, a marketing/graphics/pr team could be a good thing if the developers simply don't have the time/interest in those matters.

foxbunny wrote:

@cerise
Can we see the work in progress, or you always wait until the last minute to reveal the work? (the Font, I mean)

Well, I don't normally publish design work until I've got something ready to show. I had a design, I did the work and then published the result as a submission. WIP items usually don't have a chance to be published in my schedule -- and, if I really wanted to say something with a WIP, why not give it the time and attention it deserves to be publishable? That's just the way I work.

foxbunny · 2007-10-26 16:24:22

cerise wrote:

PDF is a great format for designs and designers, but not always so great for developers and programmers. Learning the format (today) is worth the pains, if for no other reason than most places will accept a pdf, regardless of how it was created (which isn't true for places that only accept word formats.)

Yes. But thankfully, Scribus devs really invested time and skills to make it a great app. I had a chance to test my scribus-made PDFs on more than one occasion, and they were perfect (not even a warning from Acrobat). Very nice!

cerise wrote:

Well, I don't normally publish design work until I've got something ready to show. I had a design, I did the work and then published the result as a submission. WIP items usually don't have a chance to be published in my schedule -- and, if I really wanted to say something with a WIP, why not give it the time and attention it deserves to be publishable? That's just the way I work.

Yeah, I can understand that... though, I'm very curious at the same time. I saw that strange looking font at your book site, so I guessed you must be preparing something nice for arch as well.

cerise · 2007-10-26 16:36:24

foxbunny wrote:

Yes. But thankfully, Scribus devs really invested time and skills to make it a great app. I had a chance to test my scribus-made PDFs on more than one occasion, and they were perfect (not even a warning from Acrobat). Very nice!

Linux output to pdf is really superb these days. I LOVE going straight from latex out to pdf in one shot and knowing it will print anywhere exactly as I intended.

foxbunny wrote:

Yeah, I can understand that... though, I'm very curious at the same time. I saw that strange looking font at your book site, so I guessed you must be preparing something nice for arch as well.

Ahhhhh... my font. I've spent more time on that language than most people using linux have been alive. HA!
I'm an avid science fan / scifi fan and I've been writing some scifi novels for a while now and that font is the mathematical-perfected script version of the language/font I developed for my novels.

Glyph editing can be tedious inside of most of the applications currently available, so I chose to use more precise tools to create my font -- which then can be simply imported into a font designer. Most font foundries prefer to work with solid vector-editing tools to create precise curves, splines, parabolas, hyperbolas, etc. and then import the finished product rather than using the unwieldy tools of standard font editors. I have my ideas for the arch font sketched in inkscape and illustrator, but they're just my ideas for now.

pedepy · 2007-10-26 19:30:08

well if I can put in my two cents from the arch logo proposal thread:

I didnt think there were so many concepts out there ! I have to say, my favorites are Freigeist's "second" logo (the yellow "ball" one), foxbunny's and dunc's. All three are very appealing to me... What im curious about is how is this supposed to get decided ? Do we get to vote ?

I recall from a while back there was talk of "arts packages" for arch. Maybe this could be a good time to implement such a thing, where one would just download the logo package of it's choice.

Anyway good work everyone ..

thayer · 2007-10-26 19:44:38

The devs make the final call, unless there is a tie... full contest rules here:

http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=39047

foxbunny · 2007-10-26 20:57:40

pedepy wrote:

well if I can put in my two cents from the arch logo proposal thread:
I recall from a while back there was talk of "arts packages" for arch. Maybe this could be a good time to implement such a thing, where one would just download the logo package of it's choice.

That's been discussed, and it will be "one logo to rule them all" to quote Zenlord and/or Dusty here. Personally, I think ONE package is enough. There could be more, of course, but I think those could belong to either AUR or personal package repositories, or both. I don't think it's good that the Arch team maintains unofficial artwork.

You can currently download any number of unofficial artwork from places like kde-look.org, btw.

foxbunny · 2007-10-27 00:12:50

@thayer.w

http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php? … 76#p293476

Thayer, this is quite striking, and simple. But I think its target is more in a fashion arena, or publishing... hm, or cosmetics? Very nice, though.

@lordkrandel

http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php? … 40#p293440

lordkrandel, welcome to Arch BBS. Anyway, to comment on your logo. The idea is not bad, although it has been discussed widely what simplicity can mean, apart from using simple shapes. However, the main 'flaw' of your design, imho, is that the shapes do not align any way except vertically. The problem there is that the half-circle is sitting on the very sharp tip of that A looking like it could see-saw left and right quite easily. That introduces much instability to your logo making it not only unstable, but also distrurbing. That is certainly not the way we want Arch to be: disturbingly unstable.

My advice is to go for a flat tipped A, with a MUCH wider tip, if you want capital, or, better yet, go with a lower case 'a' with the round part (the neck) in the shape of the half-circle. Can't think of any such fonts atm, and I don't think those are common, but find something that was based on geometrical shapes. 'Futura' comes to mind, but haven't used it lately so can't tell you for sure if that's the one.

@IceHand

http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php? … 91#p293391

Very nice colors. Positive, and warmish even. However, that horisontal nail you stuck on A is too small (compared to the whole thing) to make an stronger impression. Plust it does *look* like you just stuck it there (not saying you did). Could you try to find some way of integrating it a bit more? My suggestion is to try and replace the left side of A (the entire left diagonal stroke) with the nail.

Here's a quick and dirty mockup:

http://foxbunny.team88.org/arch/mockup.svg

Of course, it doesn't have to be that way. That was just an example.

Last edited by foxbunny (2007-10-27 00:32:33)

dunc · 2007-10-27 12:29:00

Wow. I'll really have to get to work on my submission now. I was feeling (fairly) confident at first, but this is getting intimidating. Not just the quality of some of the recent submissions, but the number of professionals turning up. (Thanks for the "vote", pedepy.)

For what it's worth, I agree with Thayer: simplicity is always my watchword. I've always been fascinated by reduction; how much can you take out and still get a message across? I think that fits almost exactly with the Arch philosophy and I hope I've achieved it with my design.

Of the submissions since my last post, Lordkrandel's idea (and execution) is excellent (simplicity again, see?), and I like Thayer's "minimalist series". It's very attractive, although I'm not sure it gets across the concept of "Arch-ness". IceHand's is basic, but for some reason I really like it.

foxbunny · 2007-10-27 12:34:10

dunc wrote:

Wow. I'll really have to get to work on my submission now. I was feeling (fairly) confident at first, but this is getting intimidating. Not just the quality of some of the recent submissions, but the number of professionals turning up. (Thanks for the "vote", pedepy.)

You are intimidated by just two professionals and a serious hobbyist? Wait till the rest of them start submitting their work. It's gonna get really hot.

Anyway, I was just going to say that I'm very impressed by the concentration of creative people in the Arch Community. Very strange, and very nice.

Last edited by foxbunny (2007-10-27 12:37:47)

rv2733 · 2007-10-27 14:53:40

Hello,

I came across this page. It reminded me of Arch Linux. For what it's worth:

http://www.andy-roberts.net/misc/index.html

I would like to thank everyone responsible for Arch Linux. Please continue to improve it.

Thank You, From an appreciative new user.

--rv2733

IceHand · 2007-10-27 15:20:25

foxbunny wrote:

@IceHand
http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php? … 91#p293391
Very nice colors. Positive, and warmish even. However, that horisontal nail you stuck on A is too small (compared to the whole thing) to make an stronger impression. Plust it does *look* like you just stuck it there (not saying you did). Could you try to find some way of integrating it a bit more? My suggestion is to try and replace the left side of A (the entire left diagonal stroke) with the nail.

Yeah, that might be better, I'll look into it, thanks for the suggestion. I noticed that the "nail" as you call it, looks more like a talon than an arch as it was supposed to look like.

foxbunny · 2007-10-27 15:45:20

Well, I didn't know what to call it, actually. But you understood what I was saying, so it's okay, I guess.

foxbunny · 2007-10-27 15:48:35

+1 professional designer identified: dezza. Now there's three of us.

Watch out, dunc.

Last edited by foxbunny (2007-10-27 15:49:26)

Arch Linux

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