Re: RFC: Designing Logo of Pandoc

[allefeld <c_a-1KBjaw7Xf1+zQB+pC5nmwQ@public.gmane.org>]

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In case this wasn't clear: I didn't mean to offend Alexis. I apologize if I 
did.

Regarding graphic design, I'm an amateur as much as anyone else here. If I 
make a logo, I think it is amateurish, too.

And to state what should be clear: Pandoc belongs to jgm, so whatever he 
thinks is a good logo, including none at all, is what it should be. John, 
if you like Alexis' logo, just go for it and ignore what I said. And I 
think it's great that you are so responsive to your users' ideas, but if 
you think a logo is not necessary and the discussion just stressful to you, 
close the discussion.


In my opinion, one needs at least some talent and experience to design a 
good logo. But it's not necessary to be a designer to recognize a good one; 
logos and graphics are made to appeal to us, the non-designers, so we can 
judge a logo on whether it appeals to us.

The reasons I don't like Alexis' design:
– I wouldn't edit a font designer's glyph, because if they know their job, 
all of the details of that glyph have been considered in detail, and 
changing it can only make it worse. (I have done some editing myself here 
before based on the Font Awesome Pilcrow, but I did that because I was 
asked to do so by others here, and I do think the results were amateurish.) 
– A symbol in such a document box usually stands for a file of a format. 
According to that, Alexis' design would stand for "Pandoc-flavored Markdown 
file", but not for Pandoc itself. But of course that's just a convention.
– The border line is much, much thinner than the lines that make up the 
glyph, so it's visually clear that two disparate things have been glued 
together.

A logo certainly isn't necessary, Pandoc has done well without it. The 
reason I joined this discussion is that I needed something to put on a 
button, and I wanted it to be something official. But I can just put a 
simple "P" for Pandoc on it, that's not a logo but works the same way as 
"B" for bold, and that would be ok.

In the last years, a lot of open source projects have adopted very nice 
logos, and I have gotten used to that. Just to take a close example: I 
think the now quite common though entirely unofficial Markdown logo is 
brilliantly designed. It is simple, it is consistent concerning line widths 
and spacings, it is easily recognizable. I use Markdown and particularly 
Pandoc's Markdown because it provides exactly the functionality I need. But 
having some nice imagery to go along with it is, well, nice. GNU is a 
monumental project, but come on, this doodle of a gnu?! Same for LaTeX's 
weird humanoid lion. It screams "nerds only". To be clear: I'm a nerd. It's 
not that there's something wrong with being a nerd, it's that it boxes us 
in, and the rest of the world continues happily using bad-but-pretty 
software like Word.

C

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