We need a cool logo

Discuss the LLORG's and HTLAL forum's past and its future here.
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Stelle
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Re: We need a cool logo

Postby Stelle » Mon Oct 26, 2015 12:18 pm

I'd be careful about pushing the whole "polyglot" angle. Many, many of our members have zero interest in becoming polyglots. This forum isn't about learning *lots* of languages - it's about learning *any* language. Some of our most interesting contributors have focused on only one language for years!

But I do agree that a logo would be nice!
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Re: We need a cool logo

Postby tomgosse » Mon Oct 26, 2015 2:05 pm

If you are into heraldry, and who isn't? Something like this might be interesting. The motto might be, ad omnibus linguis et ultra (to all languages and beyond).
225px-Defense_Language_Institute_copy.png
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Re: We need a cool logo

Postby Montmorency » Mon Oct 26, 2015 4:26 pm

Of course, HTLAL had/has some pretty cool visuals. That was one of the striking things about it.

We can't use those of course, but we'd have to try to do something as good.
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Re: We need a cool logo

Postby iguanamon » Mon Oct 26, 2015 4:56 pm

The HTLAL logo with the characters rotating, represents to me a combination lock unlocking a language. It's all part of a package that very clearly shows that the site is about language-learning.
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Re: We need a cool logo

Postby astromule » Mon Oct 26, 2015 4:56 pm

I'm in.

tomgosse wrote:If you are into heraldry, and who isn't? Something like this might be interesting. The motto might be, ad omnibus linguis et ultra (to all languages and beyond).
225px-Defense_Language_Institute_copy.png
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Re: We need a cool logo

Postby MorkTheFiddle » Mon Oct 26, 2015 5:14 pm

astromule wrote:I was thinking more in something like . . . a combination of famous polyglots, such as Mezzofanti and Emil Krebs, drawn like this: Image


Okay, I recognize two of these gents, who are famous writers, but who is the man on the left?
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Re: We need a cool logo

Postby pir » Mon Oct 26, 2015 7:01 pm

If you look at the best-known logos, you'll find they're quite simple, and visually striking through strong graphic design features, not complexity. They also, at their best, form some association between what's depicted and the organization they represent (though being visually striking is more important), and colours are carefully picked to lead people to infer certain characteristics (red-white-blue in the US is an appeal to patriotism). They need to display well at various resolutions, so they can't have too much fine detail. Depictions of people are rare, because you a) need instant recognition even when strongly stylized, b) strong association of that person with your brand, and c) permission, of course.

I'm not gonna criticize other people's contributions (hey, we're brainstorming), but consider them with that in mind. Colour choice is very cultural, it'd be kind of interesting to see what a culturally mixed group like ours would consider representative or at least pleasing.

The HTLAL logo is a bit more fiddly than I usually like, but it forms a neat association with language learning, so that sort of thing goes in the right direction. And it could be stylized for purposes other than a web site header.

Though maybe we ought to come up with the "new name that's coming soon" first, *grin*, or agree that ALLF it is (I am starting to associate it with that that giant alien schnoz; curses on American pop culture). For many organizations the logo ends up containing at least an acronym for the organization's name since it's easiest to create some association that way.
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Re: We need a cool logo

Postby emk » Mon Oct 26, 2015 7:10 pm

Cool ideas, everyone!

pir wrote:If you look at the best-known logos, you'll find they're quite simple, and visually striking through strong graphic design features, not complexity. They also, at their best, form some association between what's depicted and the organization they represent (though being visually striking is more important), and colours are carefully picked to lead people to infer certain characteristics (red-white-blue in the US is an appeal to patriotism). They need to display well at various resolutions, so they can't have too much fine detail. Depictions of people are rare, because you a) need instant recognition even when strongly stylized, b) strong association of that person with your brand, and c) permission, of course.

I'm with pir here: Visually simple is better (especially since it needs to work on phone screens, too). And unfortunately, we shouldn't use pictures of people unless we have written permission from them, because otherwise it implies that they personally endorse the forum, which is (sadly) not necessarily the case. Also, any third part art we use should probably be under a Creative Commons License so we don't have to pay for it and no artists feel ripped off.

One thing that works really well on a language forum is cool letters. There are a lot of awesome scripts out there. :-)

Right now, rdearman and I have been talking about making "we_universal" the default theme, though existing users could of course keep prosilver if they want it. :-) (The choice of "we_universal" was based on voting a couple months ago, when a bunch of users tried out a bunch of themes.) So I'd be interested in logos that would work with with "we_universal".

Right now, it does have some nice Egyptian inscriptions that I found., but we can certainly do better than that.
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Re: We need a cool logo

Postby astromule » Mon Oct 26, 2015 7:12 pm

That's Javier Marías: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Javier_Mar%C3%ADas

MorkTheFiddle wrote:
astromule wrote:I was thinking more in something like . . . a combination of famous polyglots, such as Mezzofanti and Emil Krebs, drawn like this: Image


Okay, I recognize two of these gents, who are famous writers, but who is the man on the left?
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Re: We need a cool logo

Postby Montmorency » Tue Oct 27, 2015 1:29 am

Thinking about logos in general, I'm reminded that older organisations in the past often started out with highly elaborate (and often quite artistic and striking visuals), and occasionally a rather old-fashioned motto underneath.

(And I'm think of the days long, long before anything like DTP or digital art was available. Some really great design work happened way back, e.g. in pre-WW2 decades).

Some UK ones I have in mind are the AA (Automobile Association) and the Cyclist's Touring Club.

Both of these modernised their logos, but in the processs they became (IMHO) rather weak and anaemic, but I guess they were moving with the times as they saw it at the time. (And I think both actually changed the meaning of the acronym, or let it be known that it was no longer an acronym, but a name in its own right, since both names sounded a bit old fashioned and in the case of the CTC, it was no longer just a club for touring cyclists.

I don't know if it still exists under that name, but there used to be the rather beautifully named "League of American Wheelmen", which I think was a similar sort of organisation to the CTC, and they had a really cool logo, which looked like it harked back to the classic days of elaborate logos.

...

Well I'm rambling a bit, but I sense here that some people definitely want to go for the more elaborate and artistically more interesting (but also more difficult to create successfully) logos. But I'm sure others would prefer to go for a "modern, clean" look.

My instinctive preference is for the more elaborate, artistic look, but it needs strong creative talent(s) to produce it. And hard to come up with something everybody likes. But if one goes for the "modern, clean" look, what seems modern today can soon seem passé (which is why modern organisations are always changing their logos (e.g. Google recently). One advantage of the "classic" look is that it often ages better. Sure it may look "old fashioned" - it was probably old-fashioned to begin with, but if it's good quality, maybe that doesn't matter.

..

And as pir said, before we have a logo, we really need a permanent name. :)

...

I just looked back at pjr's posting again, and the way he'd written ALLF hit me in the eye, and I read it as "Alf" (a one time common abbreviation of a one time common first-name "Alfred"). I think I'm going to think of this forum as "Alf" for some time to come ... :)

However, I also had a sort of mental image of a 3-D representation of those letters, drawn quite large, in outline. Could be done quite simply, or more elaborately. Perhaps with words in smaller letters (using some of the nice scripts emk refers to) saying something about what we do, in various languages, superimposed on the large ALLF, but still leaving it legible. Or something like that.
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