Is there a reason Hillary Clinton's logo has hidden notches? | Hacker News Reader

Is there a reason Hillary Clinton's logo has hidden notches?

graphicdesign.stackexchange.com

233 pointsTorgo60 comments

They don't want the bottom color peeking out, so the notches ensure there are no coincident edges.

what's a scenario that this would happen?

buggy rendering engine

It's explained in the answer on the linked page (and in the top comment). Depending on how it is rendered (due perhaps to a buggy renderer) it might show on a screen.

Any scenario where the SVG's shapes are rendered with anti-aliasing, and the edges of both overlapping shapes are mid-pixel: the edge of the top shape would be rendered with partial alpha, and then beneath that, the edge of the differently-colored lower shape would bleed through as it is also rendered, at that contiguous line, with partial alpha.

EDIT: You can actually see this very effect in action if you zoom in on the diagonal edges of the yellow and blue faces of the logo on the BBC's page for the EU referendum happening right now: http://www.bbc.com/news/politics/eu_referendum/results - on these anti-aliased diagonal edges (enlarged: http://i.imgur.com/GmxUD60.png), since there's no indentation like the one this SE question highlights, the red shape underneath both of the shapes bleeds through.

Compare the outlines of the shapes with the red shape conterminous beneath them (http://i.imgur.com/Nwyl8YE.png) to the outlines they have when that shape is removed (http://i.imgur.com/iOQmyJx.png).

You can see similar problems even without anti-aliasing. If you have three collinear points A B C, drawing a line from A to B and then B to C may hit slightly different pixels compared to just drawing a single line from A to C. If you try to draw a polygonal mesh which has T-junctions (overlapping edges whose endpoints are not identical) you can end up with slight gaps between adjacent polygons.

In 3 dimensions, a similar phenomenon causes "Z-fighting". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-fighting

Note that this is only a problem in some algorithms.

I came to this thread dreading some sort of bizarre political firefight but instead I actually learned something fairly interesting.

I am @iconjack, poser of the question, ask me anything! Kidding aside, as an avid user of the whole stackexchange suite, it is kind of interesting to me how popular this question became. It was only my second question on graphics design and it's become the all-time 3rd ranked question. Keep it going, folks!

If you're curious, the reason I was looking at the logo svg was that I thinking about making a bumper sticker. When I saw the notches, I was perplexed, and threw the question up on a whim.

You noticed I put the disclaimer at the top about the question not being about politics. I honestly thought there was a chance things would get ugly because of the loose tie-in to the whole election grotesquery. One time I asked a question on english.stackexchange.com, Is "Sent from my iPhone" correctly punctuated and capitalized?" and I practically got hate mail. Not only did I get snarky comments and answers, I believe the question was down to −8 at one point. It's since been upvoted into positive territory and some of the nasty remarks have been deleted, but I never really got what all the hate was about. One friend suggested that Apple fans would think I was dissing the iPhone or something. That's the only theory I've got.

Avoiding graphic artifacts makes sense, but I'm going to bet on conspiracy, probably involving the Masons.

I'm getting an infinite redirect from this link.

Me too, but this link works: https://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/questions/73601/is-t...

I do too, can read it from Google cache though:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:o-8fEue...

Same here, doesnt seem to resolve to a page

Weird, this link is giving me infinite redirects. I went and found it on the stackexchange site myself under hot for graphicdesign and it did the same thing. The other answers on that subdomain work just fine. Strange.

I'm getting the same thing.

I'm getting the same thing (in multiple browsers).

Do you use HTTPS Everywhere? (I don't know why that would apply in this case, but I recall various people having similar issues with it and Stack Exchange's partial HTTPS support.)

"It's not a bug, it's just how the algorithm works!"

Not a bug, just a bad algorithm.

Are there any solutions to this that don't involve rendering into a higher-resolution buffer and downsampling (or the MSAA moral equivalent)?

I guess it depends on your definition of "solution" and "MSAA moral equivalent". What you're essentially asking is, "Is there a way to approximate the combined contributions of overlapping polygons to a set of pixels without sampling the exact color at multiple points per pixel?"

One approach would be to avoid sampling at all, by using boolean geometric operations to find the exact shapes of visible polygons within a pixel, then using their color and areas to calculate their combined contributions. I expect the calculation involved will be impractical relative to multisampling, though.

Another approach would be sample exactly once per pixel or, equivalently, render the polygons without antialiasing. Naturally, that would eliminate the show-through of hidden geometry at the expense of the accuracy of pixels around polygon edges. You might then be able to approximate the antialiased values by a post-processing filter, maybe guided by the presence of edges, although doing so will introduce its own set of artifacts.

And if you consider "one sample per pixel" to be a budget over the entire image, you could sample the polygons more densely near polygon edges and more sparsely elsewhere, using nearby samples to approximate the values of pixels with no samples.

It never occurred to me that anti-aliasing methods had moral qualities at all.

Countdown until this guy is arrested for violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986 for deconstructing that SVG image.

I was hoping for something a little more sinister.

A Baphomet pentagram hidden under the arrow would've been a lot more amusing.

I can already see Trump telling us that she is part of the Illuminati and his source will be The Enquirer.

And now I will check every svg logo I come across for easter eggs.

You laugh, but the agency who designed this logo is named Pentagram.

Such sentiment seems common when talking about the Clintons.

I was led to believe her logo is the illuminati triangle, personally.

Well, in one sense it has notches.

In another, the legs are crooked.

It's hiding its crooked nature just like Hillary, WAKE UP SHEEPLE

hahaha, this comments wins for use of the word "sheeple"

If this was reddit, I'd answer with the relevant XKCD where you have awoken the Sheeple from their eternal slumber.

So my joke below gets downvoted to oblivion and yet this trash is still here. Why?

They don't want the underlying layer to show its true color ...

What could be more sinister than aliasing issues?!?

Timezones

Magnets

Calendars!

When working in finance, you care a lot about public holidays, because interest on wholesale loans between banks is calculated per business day. On global scale, there are more public holiday schemes than countries or timezones. And some countries change their public holidays willy-nilly on short notice.

Climate data lives in a wide variety of exciting calendars that no normal person would ever use. 360 day years? Check. No leap years? Check.

(I asked some of the scientists in my building, and apparently it makes the models a lot easier to write; just pushes the burden to post-processing)

getUserMedia + MediaRecorder

Don't even get me started.

Am I the only one who saw the twin towers?

Sorry, 9/11 still has me on edge.

Mmm, this answer is much better than mine because it uses the word alpha.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11965054 and marked it off-topic.

It's a dent made by Kennedy's car.

I can tell there aren't many New Englanders on HN from how buried this comment is...

Seems crooked, Trump was right all along!

I'm seeing a ton of (rightfully) down voted comments here with no clear reason from the down voters. Anyone who gets a down vote for their joke might just think it's because the joke is bad, instead if the more accurate reason that HN comments are more serious.

One of the nicer things I've seen on Reddit was when a mod leaves a reason for removing a comment. It serves to inform the commenter and also remind the community of the rules.

In a thread such as this one with potential for interesting discussion, it'd be a shame if the mods ended up killing it because the comments got out of hand.

A top stickied comment reminding people of the rules and replying to people who had their comments down voted into oblivion with a reminder might go a long way to having a civil discussion about something like this.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com