Mozpad & XulRunner logos
By Paul Rouget on Sunday 11 November 2007, 16:12 - shared - Permalink
Hi folks !
A generous artist, Marianne Thoyer, has made some work about the Mozpad identity. She works on some Mozpad logo attempts. Here some drafts:
And my favorite one:
After seeing these pictures, I thought the 'cell' ones could fit for a XulRunner logo, so, just for fun, I've asked her to change the label mozpad to xulrunner:
Before going forward, she needs to know the community feeling. Feel free to comment :)
Comments
I actually like the one with the crosshairs (second from the bottom in the big picture) best as a mozpad logo, as it both has a nice connection to the "pad" we're starting off and a targetted, to-the-point solution for application designers. It has style and is quite neutral color-wise, which makes it a good fit to many other logos.
And I really love your XulRunner one - this is a cool thing.
For Mozpad I agree with you.
For Xulrunner I prefer the third image from top, the four cells
Please label the images so we can reference them in our comments, otherwise everyone's going to be typing all sorts of proesey references to try to describe which image they're commenting on.
The bee is very intricate, I predict it won't work in small sizes such as icons.
The Mozilla mascot logo was once the logo for the Mozilla suite and mozilla.org, it would be wrong to re-use it for Mozpad.
The cross-hair is very similar to the Clam anti-virus logo and more-so ClamWin's logo: http://www.clamwin.com/.
I recommend a simpler logo for XulRunner so that will be equally distinctive at small sizes.
The bee and the eye definitely have potential, but, to me, the blobs in #4 (what are they?) look like a human bottom.
#12 for XulRunner definitely gets my vote - brilliant!
As for MozPad, I prefer #3 or #9
I like the eye; color doesn't really matter.
#11 is nice, too.
I'm not sure I get the message of the bee, and it's probably not iconic enough.
Although they look very polished (the artist has talent) most of these logos don't pass the tests: Good logo design principles include the ability to reproduce the logo in only two colours, recognizable at very small sizes, any objects used in the logo are recognizable by anyone, any objects used in the logo should be somehow tied to the entity the logo represents.
The cells are not easily recognizable objects, and could be easily confused with germs, which have rather negative connotations - viruses in the computer world. The others seem to be too complex or have little to do with the project.
This is great to see things happening though. How about something with a simple lilypad? Most people associate frogs and lizards, and the pad is, well, part of the name and representative of what mozpad is - something to sit on, build on.
The logos are great, but I did notice one thing I thought I should point out. The correct spelling is XULRunner, not XulRunner. XUL is an acronym for "XML User Interface Language", so all three letters need to be capitalized, not just the X. :)
Good luck on picking a logo!
Don't like any of them.
Back to the drawing board.
Unfortunately I think pad really does nothing for aiding graphic designers. Perhaps you should think of a more meaningful name before asking graphic designers to apply visual meaning to a meaningless name?
Yes, on reflection I think the bee is too busy (and frankly a little scary) and it isn't clear enough what the lumpy shapes are meant to be in #4 and #5. #10 is a bit over the top.
I think the eyes have potential. The target has the merit of some relevance (a helipad) and it's simple, which is a big plus. My idea was some sort of rocket, so that might be worth playing around with if Marianne has time to do another iteration. Thanks for this, Paul!
I'd prefer the #11, the pad one. In green, though.
I don't get the cell-image, nor the bee one. Let alone the cross-hair or eye. As I haven't looked at the logo discussion for mozpad at all, that might actually be valuable information, as that's more the target audience of the logo ;-)
I rather like #8... but I think we should avoid #2 pretty heavily (it looks a little too much like a certain stomping red lizard).
I actually like #2 because it's the only one that references/leverages the existing Mozilla brand. It would be interesting to see some more examples with that property...
Dan
These look great and I'm glad to see this discussion.
For the mozpad logo, I agree with the feedback in comment #8 and would love to see some logos that tie in more with a pad -- lilypad, frog, pond...
For XULRunner, before picking a logo I think we should at least consider a larger branding effort similar to WebRunner's recent change to Prism. Since WebRunner and XULRunner are related technologies, we might want the logos and brands to be related as well. For instance, we could rename XULRunner to Spectrum (just to pick another optical term) and then create a new logo based on that name. Spectrum also describes the community and technology since XULRunner is being used to build a wide range of different apps (browser, chat client, calendar, music app...). There might be other projects already using Spectrum as a name, but this gives an example of how we could pick a name that could be a little easier to use and promote than XULRunner.
Wow ! Good job !
I love the #2, #11 and #12 but every drafts are great !
I really like #11 and #12 for either mozpad or xulrunner. Another similar concept that could work for xulrunner would be DNA as apposed to cells.
Thanks and you very good logos