[Fsfe-ie] IFSO logo suggestions

[Cathal Mc Ginley]

Thanks for all your comments about the proposed logos. It's also good
to see some other logo suggestions appearing. I'll get back to the
points some of you raised before commenting on the new suggestions.
 
Malcolm Tyrrell mentioned his cartoonist friend's sketch of the gnu
and harp. Someone else suggested to me that this concept "could still
be used as webpage clipart or something" - and I certainly agree. So
by all means let us see the sketch.

Ben North wrote:
 > Could we put the "Irish Free Software Organisation" lettering in
 > some modern all-caps font?  Would it make the whole thing too tall
 > if we wrote it in two lines underneath the "ifso", taking the full
 > width?

I should have mentioned that I spent *no time at all* on figuring out
an appropriate font, or worrying about the spacing. In fact, it's
Sodipodi's default font, stretched to size by look of the eye. The
main problem of spacing, I think, is that we absolutely *need* to keep
the words 'Free Software' together, or the meaning gets lost; so the
choices seem to be the way I have it now, or all on one line, perhaps
below the logo, as David O'Callaghan suggests.

In fact, in recent days I've been putting together an IFSO letterhead
with LaTeX, and in all cases the only successful strategy has been to
have the organisation name completely separate from the logo,
i.e. logo in the top left, name and motto stretching most of the way
across the top to the right of the logo.

David O'Callaghan wrote:
 > The characters in the Celtic logo look a little mismatched, but I'm
 > not a typographer so I can't be more specific.

The characters were all taken from a single page header, so they
should match pretty much. Admittedly, the scan could have been
sharper, and the potrace conversion more careful (woggly edges). And
they were vertically and horizontally aligned by look of the
eye. To be honest, the whole process was kind of sketchy, not intended
as a final draft.

On to the new logos.

Malcolm Tyrrell's fractal-letter-style logo is a clever design, but doesn't
seem to work very well on a letterhead, being of portrait
orientation. Plus, it splits IFSO into IF SO which we probably want to
avoid.

David Golden's ogham logo again is well designed, but I think is a bit
*too* alien, and not representative enough.

David O'Callaghan's monospace font with the open type 'fs' is very
compelling. The letters need to be a good bit closer together I feel,
I've taken the liberty of doing this in my sample letterhead.

A picture of the three sample letterheads is available for your
perusal at http://homepage.eircom.net/~cathalmcginley/3styles.png

Adam Moran's idea of a CSS switcher to try out the different logos on
the website would be a great idea. http://www.csszengarden.com/ is one
example of how this can be done, but if you just specify a list of
'alternate' style sheets (as mentioned in the css spec), any recent
Mozilla or Konqueror browser should allow you to switch between them
from the View/Use Style menu.

I myself am really torn between the three choices at the moment, but I
suppose in reality this is a relatively trivial matter - and we can
always change the logo later. And none of this work need go to waste:
particular campaigns might require a particular style of logo for
promotional material.

So lets not spend too much more time on this, I propose we choose a
logo at the next meeting and just go with it. In the mean time there's
plenty of real work to be done.

       -  Cathal.

-- 
When we speak of free
     software, we are referring
     to freedom, not price.

-- 'found haiku' from the GPL