Thanks for all your comments about the proposed logos. It's also good to see some other logo suggestions appearing. I'll get back to the points some of you raised before commenting on the new suggestions.
Malcolm Tyrrell mentioned his cartoonist friend's sketch of the gnu and harp. Someone else suggested to me that this concept "could still be used as webpage clipart or something" - and I certainly agree. So by all means let us see the sketch.
Ben North wrote:
Could we put the "Irish Free Software Organisation" lettering in some modern all-caps font? Would it make the whole thing too tall if we wrote it in two lines underneath the "ifso", taking the full width?
I should have mentioned that I spent *no time at all* on figuring out an appropriate font, or worrying about the spacing. In fact, it's Sodipodi's default font, stretched to size by look of the eye. The main problem of spacing, I think, is that we absolutely *need* to keep the words 'Free Software' together, or the meaning gets lost; so the choices seem to be the way I have it now, or all on one line, perhaps below the logo, as David O'Callaghan suggests.
In fact, in recent days I've been putting together an IFSO letterhead with LaTeX, and in all cases the only successful strategy has been to have the organisation name completely separate from the logo, i.e. logo in the top left, name and motto stretching most of the way across the top to the right of the logo.
David O'Callaghan wrote:
The characters in the Celtic logo look a little mismatched, but I'm not a typographer so I can't be more specific.
The characters were all taken from a single page header, so they should match pretty much. Admittedly, the scan could have been sharper, and the potrace conversion more careful (woggly edges). And they were vertically and horizontally aligned by look of the eye. To be honest, the whole process was kind of sketchy, not intended as a final draft.
On to the new logos.
Malcolm Tyrrell's fractal-letter-style logo is a clever design, but doesn't seem to work very well on a letterhead, being of portrait orientation. Plus, it splits IFSO into IF SO which we probably want to avoid.
David Golden's ogham logo again is well designed, but I think is a bit *too* alien, and not representative enough.
David O'Callaghan's monospace font with the open type 'fs' is very compelling. The letters need to be a good bit closer together I feel, I've taken the liberty of doing this in my sample letterhead.
A picture of the three sample letterheads is available for your perusal at http://homepage.eircom.net/~cathalmcginley/3styles.png
Adam Moran's idea of a CSS switcher to try out the different logos on the website would be a great idea. http://www.csszengarden.com/ is one example of how this can be done, but if you just specify a list of 'alternate' style sheets (as mentioned in the css spec), any recent Mozilla or Konqueror browser should allow you to switch between them from the View/Use Style menu.
I myself am really torn between the three choices at the moment, but I suppose in reality this is a relatively trivial matter - and we can always change the logo later. And none of this work need go to waste: particular campaigns might require a particular style of logo for promotional material.
So lets not spend too much more time on this, I propose we choose a logo at the next meeting and just go with it. In the mean time there's plenty of real work to be done.
- Cathal.