The logo is repeatedly being called out as a weak spot of the D brand.
But so far Walter has been adamant about keeping it the way it is.
I agree with him that changing it to a completely different one would
probably not be a good move, losing whatever brand recognition we have.
But I think we should adapt the logo to the needs at hand.
It's obvious to me that the D and the moons (the two circles to the
upper right of the D) make the recognizable core of the logo. I know
that others see it the same way. That means, the D and the moons should
be kept intact. Their shapes and positions should not change.
However, I believe we can take away a lot of the decorations of the
current logo, and it will still be recognized immediately as the same brand.
Here's a little progression of simplifications, in the context of dlang.org:
http://i.imgur.com/eJaKFtx.png
The first one is the current logo. The last one shows just the core
shape (D + moons), of course.
I'm not nearly the first one to do this, but I'd like to propose
adopting the core shape as the official logo. Then specify some specific
shade of red as the official brand color. (We're using #B03931 on
dlang.org.)
We could provide multiple variants of the logo for different use cases,
and with varying levels of decoration:
* Core shape in different color combinations (black one white, red on
white, white on red).
* Versions that include the background arc (I'm interpreting that as
Mars), possibly in different colors.
* The full version with border and shadow. I.e. the current logo with
adjusted colors, and maybe some details changed, like number of borders
or amount of shininess.
For dlang.org, I'd choose the version with the wide background arc. I
think it looks nice on the menu bar, and it puts a little more emphasis
there than just the core shape. But just the core shape looks fine, too.