Stephen Weiss wrote:
My issue with the logos presented was they made solr look like a school
project instead of the powerful tool that it is. The tricked out font
or whatever just usually doesn't play well with the business types...
they want serious-looking software. First impressions are everything.
While the fiery colors are appropriate for something named Solr, you can
play with that without getting silly - take a look at:
http://www.ascsolar.com/images/asc_solar_splash_logo.gif
http://www.logostick.com/images/EOS_InvestmentingLogo_lg.gif
(Luckily there are many businesses that do solar energy!)
They have the same elements but with a certain simplicity and elegance.
I know probably some people don't care if it makes the boss or client
happy, but, these are the kinds of seemingly insignificant things that
make people choose a bad, proprietary piece of junk over something solid
and open-source... it's all about appearances! The people making the
decision often have little else to go on, unfortunately.
I concur. IMHO you should at least consider how the logo looks like when:
* it's reduced to black & white (e.g. when sending faxes or making copies)
* resized to favicon.ico size,
* resized to an A0 poster size
Many OSS projects for some obscure reason love to use color gradients,
often with broad hue spans - but such gradients rarely look well in
print, exhibiting the banding problem, and they are very easy to corrupt
when transferring images from one media to another. If we absolutely
must use gradients, then at least we should create some logo variants
without gradients - see the SVG file I created in SOLR-84 .
For these reasons I suggest:
* not using gradients
* not using small intricate elements that get lost in logos of small
size - or come up with logos of reduced complexity for smaller size versions
* avoid large splashes of uniform strong color - these look bad on large
logos, like poster-sized.
--
Best regards,
Andrzej Bialecki <><
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