Personally I am not confident that any graphic design expert could make a drawing that captures the essence of a highly mathematical and technical tool like PDL. Second, I am not confident that "the experts" design great logos anyway. Third, I am not confident in our ability to know which graphic designers are the good ones, any more than a non-programmer can recognize which people are good programmers.
Incidentally, I don't necessarily think it is even possible for a logo to remain simple and memorable and still capture something as technical as PDL. I am not a graphic designer, but I have useful background. I once took a class on design and creativity, I've read a couple of books and I've been an amateur user of Gimp and Inkscape for about a decade. Anyway, one good tip I learned in my creativity class is that the best way to have a good idea is to just have many ideas. Just throw random ideas up in the air, even if they're bad, and just see where they take you. This is what I was hoping to accomplish over the last few days. The last few days were not about design by committee, they were about brainstorming. It is an evolutionary process. Someone someone says sparks a new idea from someone else, which in turn sparks another idea from somebody else. I tried to encourage this brainstorming the last few days because I know it is a good way to foment creativity. Then more recently I started a vote in order to distill the best ideas out of the large pool of ideas. This is just the next step in the design process. First you let your mind run wild without worrying about whether the ideas are good or not, and then you try to pick out the best ideas you came up with. This is what I tried to do most recently. It was a process for creative design that I learned and which I've seen provide good results. It is not the same thing as design by committee. Daniel. On Mon, Jul 19, 2010 at 10:23 PM, P Kishor <[email protected]> wrote: > On Mon, Jul 19, 2010 at 3:01 PM, Daniel Carrera <[email protected]> wrote: >> Updated. >> >> Btw, as of now we have 18 voters. So quite a few people have expressed >> their opinion with this poll. >> >> I must admit that I don't know how we are going to agree on the final >> logo here. We might need the "benevolent dictator for life" to jump in >> and make a few executive decisions. >> > > > I really appreciate Daniel's perseverance, enthusiasm and hard work in > pursuing this and the general web site updates. With that out of the > way, the following is completely my opinion. > > I haven't voted for any logo because I personally don't think any of > the logos are good enough (yes, not even the ones I myself > contributed). None of them quite capture what PDL is about, nor convey > what it can do. Christian's PDL prompt is probably the best of the > lot, but while it conveys a sophistication and seriousness of the > tool, it doesn't do justice to it beyond reducing it to a command > prompt. > > I personally don't think a logo is created via a committee. It is just > one of those creative exercises that is best left to a trained logo > designer who (metaphorically) sits down with a few of the serious > developers/users/and of course, the original creator of PDL, gets > their views, and then tries to capture it all in an icon. > > Once again, I reiterate, in my view PDL without a logo is better than > PDL with a bad logo. > > PDL is coming of age. It has existed for a while, but now it is > attracting non-traditional users, folks such as me, with no background > in the traditional PDL disciplines. Chris Marshall (and Matt Kenworthy > and others) are doing great work in making the installs easy and > easier. The documentation is getting hammered into good shape. A new > version of the PDL book, htmlized and all, would be great. The PDL map > does a useful job of showing the spatial and disciplinary spread of > PDL, but sadly it is underpopulated -- I mean, if PDL has less than > two dozen users around the world then it probably is not worth the > development effort. I really doubt that is the case though, but where > are the rest of the users? Why are they not submitting their data? Are > they not aware of this list? Are they not aware of the PDL map? > > In my view, PDL is really one of the most exciting things about Perl. > It makes Perl as fast as C, and makes complicated algorithms and > techniques as easy as Perl. It really deserves the front-page on Perl, > on par with DBI. > > Coming back to the logo -- my personal wish is that once a small set > of possible logos is identified, then the senior developers, perhaps > Karl (if he has the time), contact some Perl/opensource friendly logo > designer and see if she/he would lend their chops to doing a logo > worthy of PDL. > > Ok. With that, once again, my deep appreciation for Daniel and others' > enthusiasm about making PDL and "its looks" better. > > > -- > Puneet Kishor http://www.punkish.org > Carbon Model http://carbonmodel.org > Charter Member, Open Source Geospatial Foundation http://www.osgeo.org > Science Commons Fellow, http://sciencecommons.org/about/whoweare/kishor > Nelson Institute, UW-Madison http://www.nelson.wisc.edu > ----------------------------------------------------------------------- > Assertions are politics; backing up assertions with evidence is science > ======================================================================= > > _______________________________________________ > Perldl mailing list > [email protected] > http://mailman.jach.hawaii.edu/mailman/listinfo/perldl > -- Intolerant people should be shot. _______________________________________________ Perldl mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.jach.hawaii.edu/mailman/listinfo/perldl
