On 11 November 2010 19:55, MZMcBride <z(a)mzmcbride.com> wrote: I think this not being a photo does not make it better than the photo version. It's entirely unclear there's enough of a problem to be solved here. - d.

On 11/11/2010 21:37, Marco Schuster wrote: +1 I think this is already an improvement, though more could be done (e.g. get rid of the shadow completely, maybe use a slightly warmer yellow or more of a colour fade). For comparison: I recently re-designed the SMW logo completely, picking up the MW flower theme. The result is at: http://semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/Logo No shadows there, but more heavy bordering lines. Essentially two colours. Some prominent colour transitions and blur to add some life. Markus

Firs let me say, especially with this 2nd version, good work on this! I've personally worked on revising this logo about 3 times, trashing my work after a bit because it's such a difficult logo to get right. I would like to see a few of the other artists in our community also take a stab at revising it. The typical process is to collect a few different versions and take a vote, we should probably just follow suit with that. As for the colors - I think there's no reason for MediaWiki's logo to conform to the WMF color scheme. MediaWiki, like Wikipedia has it's own community of which some WMF staff are a part of - it's totally reasonable for them to have their own identity. That said, Yellow is a difficult color to work with and get right, so I will be interested to see if much can be done to improve this at all, or if we've essentially peaked already. Perhaps we can start a page somewhere around http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:MediaWiki_logos to perform this process? - Trevor On 11/12/10 10:45 AM, Leo wrote:

On Fri, Nov 12, 2010 at 4:29 PM, Max Semenik <maxsem.wiki(a)gmail.com> wrote: This. I'm not opposed to refreshing the logo if we can come up with some good alternatives (a community vote with several finalists like Trevor mentioned would be best). Give the choice between sticking with our current one or using this, I'd stick with the current logo. -Chad

On 12 November 2010 21:29, Max Semenik <maxsem.wiki(a)gmail.com> wrote: Yes, that's what I don't like about the proposal. - d.

On 13/11/2010 00:36, Happy-melon wrote: +1 The current version lacks "life" mainly because it is slightly too simple and yet not fully abstract. It is a good basis to build a logo on, but it still more like a first drawing that still needs to be "coloured" to come to life. I don't think this is a question of vector vs. bitmap, or old vs. new. And it certainly is no reason to discourage further work on this topic. again, +1 We should be able to agree that the MediaWiki logo, while doing a good job for many years, has still a very hand-crafted, home-made look to it. This actually extends beyond the logo to the MediaWiki web site as a whole. I think saying so does in no way diminish the great work that past contributors have done in creating what we currently have -- but this must not stop us from looking into possibilities for future improvements. It is quite normal that one likes the things that one got used to over the years. Any new proposal that is similar to the existing logo will have to compete with our mental inertia that makes us feel like "it should look different, somehow" (namely, more like the old logo that we expect to see). It takes some effort to step back and try to take a fresh view on the whole thing. It helps, I think, to compare the logo and general "branding" of other popular OSS projects. Consider: * http://www.mozilla-europe.org/en/firefox/ * http://www.ubuntu.com/ * http://wordpress.org/ * http://rubyonrails.org/ * http://drupal.org/ * ... There is a long way to go for MW here, and we better encourage anyone who feels like taking up even a small part of this effort. Revising the logo would be a step to get closer to this (and why not? we could have just as cool/pretty/welcoming website as any of the above!). And it cannot be assumed that each step in this process will improve every aspect -- some things will have to be given up. Maybe the current logo does really not improve by careful redrawing (e.g. since yellow is an inconvenient colour, yet the only one that fits this flower image). But even if this was true, should we really tell contributors to make their work look more like the old logo, or even to give up and accept what we have? I think the opposite reaction is needed: actively encourage fresh, experimental proposals -- we can still reject them if they don't get anywhere. Be bold! Just my 2 cents. Markus

On 11/13/10 12:09 AM, Ashar Voultoiz wrote: So much better to stick with real life rather than choose plastic (pouah) Florence