[racket-dev] Racket logo

An hour and a half ago, Robby Findler wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 9, 2012 at 10:04 PM, Eli Barzilay <eli at barzilay.org> wrote:
> > Apparently I was confused, and didn't realize that this wasn't a
> > discussion but a change that is already the default.
> 
> I put it there to make easy for people to see it in one of the more
> prominent places where it will appear, not because "this isn't a
> discussion". Software makes it easy to change these things. ;)

I was confused by the commit -- I thought that you added a "plt" magic
combo for the startup that shows the new one, not the other way.

In any case, I'll try to explain my opinion about this.  The first
thing that I don't like is the lack of "λ".  The visual pun is mostly
lost (and for a good reason: try to rotate+mirror it to a λ and you'll
see that it's barely recognizable), and I think many will view it as
just a weird "r".  This is very different from the realm of racket
logo (http://tmp.barzilay.org/ror.jpg) logo that is an excellent pun
(and which incidentally will get mostly trashed if the racket logo
changes to the suggested one).

So if the decision is to do that, the next thing that me dislike it is
that it's *just* an "r".  It's not the first character in "Racket",
it's not a unique operator in the language, it's just an "r".  It's
true that it's a pretty "r", but it really does look like it is just
going straight down the twitter/facebook/google path, making it even
more of a non-statement.  A logo is IMO an important aspect, and you
don't need to be a graphic designer to know that a logo is important
visual identity -- and as such I *really* don't want the racket
identity to be "stylish r", especially not when "stylish lowercase
character" is so chewed up.

This is why I suggested adding some "acket", so it's not doing that.
It's true that at tiny sizes (favicon) it will have to be dropped, but
at least the full version provides (in my view) some good excuse for
the small version being "acket"-less.  I did a quick sketch for this
here:

  http://tmp.barzilay.org/r.png

If I need to quantify my choices from 1 to -1, they would be 70% for
the current one (not 100% since I'm fine with some refreshing), 10%
for some version with "acket", and -70% for the suggested
character-less-imo "r".

-- 
          ((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x)))          Eli Barzilay:
                    http://barzilay.org/                   Maze is Life!