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Comment by lwhi | Hacker News Reader

I'm not certain I like it.

Think about its purpose; it needs to work with a huge range of styles, each of which will have specific and varied audiences.

The choices made (collegiate typeface / bright orange) are quite bold; I don't think it lends itself to sympathetically supporting a broad range of differing styles of design.

Also, when this is used, it's likely to be quite small - the gap between the tail of the '5' and its upper curve is slight. I think it will have a tendency to resemble a '6' at smaller resolutions.

Maybe I'm being too negative, but on top of all this I don't think it looks visually appealing or balanced. I don't think the proportions (forced perspective / surrounding gap vs. typeface weight) are pleasing to look at.

But then again, maybe once we see it everywhere, it's ubiquity will create new associations and familiarity will win out.

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Also, when this is used, it's likely to be quite small - the gap between the tail of the '5' and its upper curve is slight. I think it will have a tendency to resemble a '6' at smaller resolutions.

Someone realized this. If you look at the favicon, they've dropped the tail.

Ah, well, I think that impacts on consistency.

The smaller version of the logo should be the primary use-case imo.

It's very common to have structural changes in letters at different sizes in order to maintain readability, yet no one complains about consistency. Why?

Because being consistent is very deliberately not supposed to require being identical. So long as the visual identity is maintained, and I think it is, then small changes are welcomed.

Most logos / marks need to be compatible with a broad range of media formats. Any system generally needs to be flexible - whilst remaining true to its original concept.

If the mark needs to be altered to work in a particular format, I think that could show a lack of foresight on the part of the designers. I'm playing devil's advocate though.

I think a very simple HTML + black shield border + black 5, could provide a useful additional mark; which might prove less obtrusive.

"It's very common to have structural changes in letters at different sizes in order to maintain readability, yet no one complains about consistency. Why?"

I don't know of any common examples of logos which make similar structural changes - but I'd be very happy to be proven wrong.

They are distributing black and white versions like you mention. Moreover these can be easily colorized to subtly blend with a design. The ease of this transformation does show foresight. The real issue is instead the boldness of the shield and font choices, but that fits the use case of the logo which is pride in technology and standards compliance. Not every website must use the logo, obviously. All said and done, very, very few will no matter how popular the logo is.

I'm on a really poor connection, so I'll do research later, but the difference between display and body variants in fonts comes to mind immediately. Knowing the two distinct use cases will highlight very different properties of the font's design, the letterforms are varied. The differences can be fairly large, however it is always clear that the two fonts are from the same family.

"They are distributing black and white versions like you mention. Moreover these can be easily colorized to subtly blend with a design. The ease of this transformation does show foresight."

I see your point .. setting a typeface involves decisions re. kerning and many fonts use 'hinting' to ensure they can be read well at varying sizes, and some display faces are altered to suit headline text or specific use cases - but I think most logos have aims which are more specific than a typeface.

If people are free to alter the colours of a logo to suit a design, and the rules for doing so aren't defining clearly - before long a logo isn't able to fulfil it's purpose, because the unifying elements of the design become unclear.

That's not to say that a logo has to be the same everywhere - a successful identity system can break the rules, but if it does so, it needs to be very consistent in the way those rules are broken. I think agencies like Wolf Olins provide a good example of this kind of thinking.

I don't think the the adaptation of the HTML5 logo for the smaller favicon format is a feature - it seems like an afterthought.

The choices I see are:

     (1) Do not correct the 5 and cause people to misidentify the logo at small sizes since it looks like a 6 then

     (2) Correct the 5 at the cost of an almost imperceptible change in small instantiations of the logo

     (3) Redesign the whole thing to use a font that is distinctive at all sizes

Between (1) and (2), I feel that (2) is always the winner. (3) appears to beat them both, but it means prioritizing distinction at small sizes at the same level as style, text color, weight, and any number of higher level and arguably more important factors. I feel like this exact tradeoff was done by the designer and their choice of (2) very well founded.

Wolf Olins is a particularly good example of the fact that brand is far larger than logo. I'm not even a particular fan of this new HTML5 brand, I feel like it overemphasizes and romanticizes a tool, but I won't get caught arguing that it's not comprehensive, or strongly suggested by all of the proposed instantiations on the website, or to weak to survive the likely numerous changes it'll suffer should it be widely adopted.

I agree about the three options - and I think (3) would have been the best outcome - because whenever this logo is used, it will most probably be shown as relatively small badge.

For example - this blog (http://almaer.com/blog/) is listed as an example of the logo in action on the launch page.

I think this page is a good example of my point; at this size, the logo suffers from the '5-becoming-6' problem - it doesn't actually communicate its message successfully at the most basic level.

I've had a think about this in a bit more detail - and the more I think about it, the less impressed I am.

I think the whole concept should have been based around producing a mark that can identify whether a product supports HTML5 technologies.

I don't think the logo should have been produced to place on a site (or teeshirt) to show allegiance to the cause - I think it should have been created along the lines of the DVD, USB, HD or Blueray industry support logos.

An identity that helps promote HTML5 as a consumer technology - and shows a consumer at a glance, whether the product they are about to download or buy is capable enough to adhere to the upcoming spec.

But maybe that's what this is? Still, I'm a bit doubtful about whether it achieves these aims.

it doesn't actually communicate its message successfully at the most basic level.

As a marketer, I agree.

Yes, the color orange is that loud, exuberant, hilarious friend you take on a pub crawl but never to church.

yeah, I agree. I LIKE it, but for a W3C logo? A standard? It's a bit much.

I agree. We should go back to the W3C's existing visual design, which I've always found to be beautiful.

In addition, in my case at least, it's causing eye-strain.

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