Sage logo -- Proposal

[jplab]

Hi all,

Lately, I was suggested to create a post concerning the Sage logo. It would be nice to have an open discussion about some possibilities. Perhaps this is a good place to do so.

I hope the discussion will be constructive.

Indeed, one may ask the reason "why bother?", "why change the logo?". This is indeed a relevant question to ask. Perhaps this thread could gather ideas about the sage logo and opinions about it?

I believe it seems to some users and developers that the logo is something that looks like an icosahedron. Is that the case in the origin?

If so, I used sage and tikz to produce a similar picture which is an actual faithful drawing of an icosahedron. (I join the picture and the code to this post). I kind of like the picture and it was produced using Sage (and tikz)! A self-made logo is cool also I would say?

Could this be used to produce a logo for sage?

Plusses:
-vector graphics
-custumizable

One could also easily add the "sage" letter logo to it.

What do you think?

[Vincent Knight]

I can't say I have a problem with the current logo however having seen you talk about the code behind this one I think it's super cool to have a logo produced by Sage itself. I like it.

Vince

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[William Stein]

I wonder if there is a way to have the text "SageMath", now that we
changed the name officially.

It is a great idea to "refresh" the logos periodically. I think the
history of the logos for Sage:

- In 2006, Alex Clemesha's little brother drew something, which Alex
then turned into the first logo with a sort of 'infinity' symbol in
the middle. Alex is a so-cal skater/surfer, and was probably inspired
by that in design...?

- A year or two later I think maybe Harald Schilly designed the
icosahedron logo. I'm sure he has vector graphics for it. I might be
wrong about who did the design.

- And here we are?

-- William

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[Volker Braun]

Looks nice, and it would be great to use as graphics on the sagemath web page.

What IMHO is lacking is that it is too complicated. A *logo* is ideally recognizable at 16x16px (e.g. favicon) and that pretty much excludes an icosahedron. Its just too busy for that purpose. Maybe a tetrahedron would work. There is a reason why its the Nike swoosh and not the 20 Nike swooshes.

[Ivan Andrus]

Vector graphics can be found from here:
http://wiki.sagemath.org/CorporateIdentity

I don’t think it’s an icosahedron though. IIRC it’s some combinatorial graph or other.

-Ivan

[François Bissey]

It's definitely a d20 otherwise known as an icosahedron. It may
be generated as a combinatorial graph or some other things but it
still is a d20 to me.
Possibly the role playing game association may push some people to
change it.

Francois

[john_perry_usm]

On Sunday, March 29, 2015 at 11:07:10 AM UTC-5, Volker Braun wrote:

What IMHO is lacking is that it is too complicated. A *logo* is ideally recognizable at 16x16px (e.g. favicon) and that pretty much excludes an icosahedron. Its just too busy for that purpose. Maybe a tetrahedron would work. There is a reason why its the Nike swoosh and not the 20 Nike swooshes.

The logo of the Mathematical Association of America is also an icosahedron, in fact a somewhat busier one, since they also highlight a right triangle at the bottom.

Of course, if the MAA's logo is an icosahedron, maybe Sage should look for a different logo. Or not; it's not as if the MAA hasn't complained so far.

Wasn't there some sort of elliptic curve logo for a while?

[kcrisman]

I am pretty sure the current Sage logo is not an icosahedron - Harald can explain the exact provenance, I am sure.  Count the edges and vertices etc.  There are faces with four sides, for instance.

[Nicolas M. Thiery]

Hi,

On Sun, Mar 29, 2015 at 08:23:53AM -0700, jplab wrote:
> Lately, I was suggested to create a post concerning the Sage logo. It
> would be nice to have an open discussion about some possibilities.
> Perhaps this is a good place to do so.
> I hope the discussion will be constructive.
> Indeed, one may ask the reason "why bother?", "why change the logo?".
> This is indeed a relevant question to ask. Perhaps this thread could
> gather ideas about the sage logo and opinions about it?
> I believe it seems to some users and developers that the logo is
> something that looks like an icosahedron. Is that the case in the
> origin?
> If so, I used sage and tikz to produce a similar picture which is an
> actual faithful drawing of an icosahedron. (I join the picture and the
> code to this post). I kind of like the picture and it was produced
> using Sage (and tikz)! A self-made logo is cool also I would say?
> Could this be used to produce a logo for sage?

Personal opinion: I find the logo proposed by Jean-Philippe a very
nice improvement on the the previous icosahedron-but-not-quite; my
brain is at peace trying to reverse engineer what it is!

So I vote for upgrading.

Cheers,
Nicolas
--
Nicolas M. Thiéry "Isil" <nth...@users.sf.net>
http://Nicolas.Thiery.name/

[Harald Schilly]

On Sunday, March 29, 2015 at 5:23:53 PM UTC+2, jplab wrote:

What do you think?

Hi, sorry to spoil the party. I'm strongly against changing the logo in such a substantial way.  I'm happy with slight adoptions or creating "doodles" (temporary modifications with a specific theme) but not a change like that. 

There are two main reasons for me:

The logo itself is the work of a professional designer. It's crucial to get all details right for such an important piece of graphics, and that's the reason why the logo works on display, as a small App Icon (IOS or Android) or as large as a poster printout. Just using the generic output of any graphics engine might look nice on first glance, but details do matter and it would need some manual work to fix it. That's why there exists the profession "graphics designer" on its own, where talented people learn how to do this properly. (Mathematican's wouldn't want any lay person to make proofs which just look neat but are nonsense, either). Concretely for the logo above, the outer ring of the dots do not align with the lines, there is no 3D effect (varying dot sizes and line thicknesses) and the dashed background lines might cause troubles at smaller scale.

The second reason is, that after more than 6 years (I think?) it is already pretty iconic and many can identify it. It has been used in many places, sticker, poster, apps, and even advertisements in academic journals. A change like that would kill all this.

... and finally, it has already been mentioned that there are others who have a semi-transparent icosahedron as their logo. I know about the AMS, but I'm sure there might be others.

And besides all that, would you be the maintainer of the logo? In the last years I got quite a few emails about the logo, where some wanted it in a special variation, a size, needed handholding for some adoptions / file-format changes or other (rather fuzzy) requests. So, it's much more than just replacing it on a couple of places, but an ongoing task. Just a warning ;-)

-- harald

[jplab]

Dear Harald,

Thank you very much the detailed answer! This is pretty much what I was looking for!

Indeed, it seems like a big decision to change the logo "just like that". It is good to know
about the whole story behind the logo.

Of course, the point that logos develop a certain signature for a product and that it takes
a lot of work, time and effort for people to instinctively recognize it... Nevertheless,
sometimes logos evolve... Perhaps it is not time for Sagemath yet. Maybe eventually, it
may influence the choice of a next version of the logo...

Best,
JP

[jplab]

Interestingly, I just noticed that on the sagetrac webpage, the logo is different than the usual one:

http://trac.sagemath.org/

It seems that this is actually the "real" picture behind Sagemath logo. Could that be?

This would be that the logo is actually some sort of Schlegel diagram of a higher dimensional polytope?

[Robert Jacobson]

I think a logo refresh would be great. Companies refresh their logos all the time without loss of continuity or brand recognition. I agree with the concern that this kind of thing requires the skills of a professional designer, but I don't see why such a professional couldn't be involved at the appropriate time. 

But I'm more of an enthusiastic end-user with aspirations to soon become a contributor rather than an established member of the developer community, so I don't know if my opinion should count.

Best,

Robert

[Samuel Lelievre]

Some time ago a question about the Sage logo was asked and answered on Ask-Sage.

http://ask.sagemath.org/question/7667/geometric-name-of-sage-logo-existence-of-dual/