Hi @Kolen
Can you explain the pun on pan? I don't get it... (may be because I'm not native in English).
pun: a joke exploiting the different possible meanings of a word or the fact that there are words which sound alike but have different meanings.
more than all I though it was also self-referential to the "pun" itself (being "pan" pronounced in a very closely manner)
And I think the handle on the logo makes the 2 corners on the top left and bottom right too much empty space. If the logo is to be refined, may be the handle can be made much shorter, perhaps thicker, kind of cute way.
I absolutely agree. I had some dfficoulties though, I've googled for pans icons and realized that most of them were not clearly perceivable as frying pans — like you said, it can be mistaken for a magnifying glass.
In monochrome is difficoult to render the border of the pan.
Another idea to treat the empty space is to put another document on the outer border. But I'm not sure "document within document" has the right message.
Maybe the best thing is to try ideas directly in some graphic design software — seeing is stronger than imagining. Sometimes I got best results by just playing around until I got an image that clicked as being the right one.
The reason why I liked the frying pan is because there are also other linguistic association with cookery:
- We usually have a "Cookbook" for everything computer-related.
- Markdown comes in "flavors" — again, a taste/food association
- There are quite a few tools out there with names like "Chef", "Gourmet", ecc.
But really, it was more a proposal to look into a logo which could be simple and immediate.
I've found some of the logo ideas/sketches presente here as being a bit too sofistaced — which doesn't mean I don't personally like them, I'm just saying they might convey an image of pandoc being a complicate tool, for experts-only.
References to Greek, mythology, maths symbols, and the like, are probably going to convey an image of complexity which might constrast with pandoc's nature as a tool that simplifies task, rather than adding complexity.
Triangles tend to be associated with corporate logos. I think there is an expectation when it comes to logos, somehow we have an average perception of what a corporate logo should like like, and what a FOSS software logo might look like. For example, many popular FOSS projects have logos depicting animals, or simple icons-like images. Corporate logos tend to focus on geometrical shapes like triangles, square, circles. Apple is an evident exception — and its logo has been very successful and popular.
Of course, these are general consideration, not exact rules.
Symbols are really a complicate subject matter. Artists warn us that "a pipe is not always a pipe", but psychonalists admit that "a cigar sometimes is just a cigar".
The layman is left wondering what he has been really smoking all of his life — and not without the feeling that symbols-experts have been hidying something from him, or that they are jusging him somehow negatively.
I say: "A frying pan is just a frying pan!"