[boost] Re: Logo Contest Current Tally

From: David Abrahams (dave_at_[hidden])
Date: 2005-03-09 09:53:14

"David B. Held" <dheld_at_[hidden]> writes:

> David Abrahams wrote:
>> Aleksey Gurtovoy <agurtovoy_at_[hidden]> writes:
>> 
>>>David Abrahams writes:
>>>
>>>>Or it doesn't iconify well, just for example.
>>>
>>>Never understood why it's important. What's the use case for it
>>>besides that smallish icon in the browser's address line that hardly
>>>anybody cares about? 95% of all the logos out there don't iconify well
>>>or at all.
>> Okay, you have a point -- sort of.  The graphic parts of many of the
>> best logos I can think of are iconish in nature.  I'm thinking of
>> Pepsi, Nike, Sun, Microsoft Windows, BMW, Toyota, Apple...
>> Not that I can say much about _why_ I think that's important ;-)
>
> I think it's important because it illustrates a kind of robustness
> in the logo's visual qualities.  We demand our code to scale, why
> not our graphics?  Logos that iconify well have an *elegance* to
> them that is not fragile and scale-sensitive.  That elegance is
> what people respond to.  It's also about branding.  A nicely scalable
> logo is more likely to evoke the associated brand without any
> accompanying text.

Okay, good points.

> Having said all that, I guess I have to wonder if perhaps Boost
> really *needs* such a high-powered logo.  

Would we survive without it?  Sure.  Would we go further, better with
a high-powered logo?  I think so.

> It's not like a development
> tool where end-user applications might contain the logo as a default
> icon.  

I can easily imagine some end-user applications displaying the icon in
a splash screen.

> It's not like an application that generates data files that
> might contain the logo.  It's not like a commercial enterprise that
> might want to put the logo on various marketing and advertising
> products.  

No, it's like a non-commercial enterprise that might want to put the
logo on various marketing and advertising products ;-) and I can
easily imagine several commercial enterprises that might want to do
the same.

> So at the end of the day, perhaps we should content
> ourselves with something that looks good on the website, since that
> is probably where the logo will appear 99% of the time.
>
> My own desire for a scalable logo probably derives more from a
> demand for excellence than an actual identifiable need of the
> Boost "brand".  

I think Boost "needs" excellence.

> I guess I think of a nice but non-scalable logo as a finely designed
> concrete type, and an elegant scalable logo as a powerful generic
> type.  The scale-bound logo works fine in prescribed contexts, but
> the scale-free logo works in nearly any context.  Since Boost aims
> to provide powerful libraries that free the user from
> context-specific solutions as much as possible, I tend to transfer
> that expectation to its art, which may not necessarily be fair.

I don't know about unfair.  It may not be realistic, but that's
another question.

-- 
Dave Abrahams
Boost Consulting
www.boost-consulting.com