Chris: Yes, yes, I certainly do realize I'm being a PC-nazi, but this
does seem much more overt. I do think we can think up a better slogan
than "let your environment grow." Did you guys come up with that
through
any kind of process, or was it just something Jesse whipped up as he
was
going the really nice site? The beautiful phallus of a flower doesn't
have much to do with Shining Stars either ;-)
Other off-the-cuff slogan possibilities:
"Shoot for the stars",
"Let your desktop shoot for the stars",
"Let your desktop environment shoot for the stars"
(these might be more apropos, don't you think?)
First of all, let me just say that I'm lame since I had to find out
about this list through random Google stumbling (shame on me!). If I
had known, you can bet I would have piped up already.
Second, here's the train of thought behind the photo, tag line, etc.
When coming up with the logo originally, we were looking for something
star-related, but something a bit more organic. I discovered the star
flower < http://www.rook.org/earl/bwca/nature/herbs/trientalis.html >,
which I thought expressed both, while also being composed of very
simple and clean forms.
I wanted to find a public, free, royalty-free image to use as the basis
of the homepage, and did a search for 'star flower' on morguefile.com,
coming up with this:
http://morguefile.com/archive/index.php?
search_log=true&terms=star+flower
While the image by chamomile wasn't exactly the star flower I had in
mind, I thought the image was attractive, had some beautiful colors,
and was well-shot and professional. It showed the growth and naturalism
we were trying to express.
I had originally used the tagline 'Let your desktop grow', as can be
seen on the first round design here <
http://www.jesseross.com/clients/etoile/site/01/etoile_site.jpg >.
Quentin suggested 'environment' rather than 'desktop', which is at the
same time I think more vague and more accurate. I'll leave it for you
guys to debate the merits of either.
I never saw the phallic connection, and it's still a stretch for me to
see it (and believe me, that's saying something... artists are weird
like that). There are a couple of solutions I think we could take,
though, if you're all really bugged by it:
1) Find another image -- just make sure we're not stealing it, that we
work according to the license, etc.
2) Photoshop the image we have and remove the 'offending plant part'.
3) See if there is a way to re-crop the original image
Also, regarding the proposed alternate taglines, anything about
'shooting to the stars' sounds cheesy and unprofessional. And, anyone
who doesn't know French won't get the star connection anyway. If we
really want a new tagline, I'd rather try and convince one of my
copywriter friends to write some lines for us... but only after making
up a list of the qualities that we think the Etoile Project should
embody and evoke (growth, minimalism, connection, simplicity, etc).
J.
