[racket-dev] new logo

Yesterday, Neil Toronto wrote:
> I decided to play with this one a bit. I used PLT's lambda, put the "r" 
> in the same style, and then made it into a "lambda r.acket" banner.
> 
> Here's the deal, though. This one, even just the "lambda r." in a
> circle, is pushing complexity. We've been approaching logo design
> too much like language design, trying to cram as much semantic
> content as possible into a small space or into the fewest shapes.  A
> logo exists primarily to make a good impression on outsiders.
> Filling it with too much meaning works actively against this.

+8.5.  My first thought when I saw this was that it goes in the
direction of the Haskell logo that looked more like a homework problem
than a logo (seems that it's almost extinct now -- found one here:
http://blog.webspecies.co.uk/2011-05-31/lazy-evaluation-with-php.html).

I tried a whole bunch of things with the version I suggested earlier,
but they all suffer from looking like they're trying too much.  (There
were also similar suggestions, like the pregnant lambda, or the cult
symbol, or the mirrored-2 symbol.)  I finally went back to the simple
thing that Michael did, tweaked a lambda to look a little more like a
part of an "R" (pointy serif-like ends, higher hip for the leg).

The result looks like a clear R on a brief look, and at the same time
the λ is also very clear:

  http://tmp.barzilay.org/logo/1-=-ipage.html

The only thing that bugged me about it was that when it's placed in
the usual circle border, the ")" part touches the circle in a bad
way.  I've played with two solutions that look nice: use a slanted
ellipse instead (which also adds a dynamic look), and use a textured
background.  You can see that too in the same directory.

BTW, the images will look bad since they're resized badly, there's an
"[original]" link that goes to the unresized version.


All of this was following a night of looking through *all* of the
fonts on my machine, and choosing a λ and an R to model this on.
There's a logo.xcf.bz2 file there if anyone wants to play with this.
(The important part is the topmost path.)

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