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Comment by lekevicius | Hacker News Reader

Old logo was probably the cleverest rendering of a fox using very few lines. The new logo is a lot less smart, much more standard. Typography is also uninspiring: seems to be using Inter, which is designed to not have any character (pun not intended). Although, to be fair, old logo also had very basic typography.

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The GitLab logo/mascot is actually a tanuki, a Japanese racoon dog. It symbolizes our values as a smart animal that works in a group to achieve a common goal.

Be honest, you picked it because Tanuki Mario is the best Mario.

...I mean. It doesn't hurt ;)

If the intent of the redesign was to make this more apparent, it also failed in that goal. Old and new both look like a fox.

Old(er) tanuki-like logo for comparison https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/gitlab-artwork/-/blob/9b07772f...

The intent of the redesign is for the logo to reflect GitLab's place at the center of the DevOps infinity loop.

Why not just do some play on an infinite loop then?

If you check out the post, you can see/read how it is a play on an infinity loop.

Gitlab is at the center of the devops infinity loop huh? News to me

Wait, but the other image file is named fox.png? https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/gitlab-artwork/-/blob/9b07772f...

That's pretty damn funny.

Not quite. The new one also looks like an evil owl. The old one didn't have a beak.

Your logo is a fox to everyone though, doesn't really matter what the intent was.

No worries, the tanuki and kitsune (fox) are often associated together, as friends or rivals, and have similar folkloric powers and trickster natures. In fact in recent Mario games, when he acquires a tanuki leaf, Luigi transforms into a kitsune.

Agree as a Japanese.

It even is a fox to GitLab as some commenter pointed out, read the file name:

https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/gitlab-artwork/-/blob/9b07772f...

Not going to lie, I just learned moments ago it wasn't a fox, and honestly looking at tanuki images on google, is still looks more like a fox then it does a tanuki. For me it's the colors throwing everything off.

Ah (totally serious comment, not intending to be insulting or flippant): I always thought it was just a cheeky copy of GitHub's Octocat, because that's how GitLab started too, an open source implementation of GitHub.

Didn't know about this animal, pretty cool.

I believe the Tanuki are much more known in the symbolic sense as mischevious and shapeshifting though no?[1] At least in Japan, where they are native to. There always seems to be one outside of an Izakaya with a flask of sake.[2]

[1] https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-tanuki-japan-s-tri...

[2] https://www.alamy.com/ceramic-statues-of-two-bake-danuki-tan...

Y'all are gonna get really bored of explaining that your dog-like silhouette in distinctively fox colors is a brown raccoon dog.

You might as well have a bright yellow circle to represent the moon.

I was never a fan of the almost like gemstone like angularity of the old one. For me the new one does a good job capturing the spirit and the silhouette while just feeling a bit... nicer. I don't really know how else to put it, it just feels a lot more pleasant to look at.

It's the opposite for me: the old one was playful with that gem/animal in-between, whereas in the new one only the animal part remains. And what's left of the gem-like lines makes it an animal with a mean/aggressive expression on its face.

It's funny how a few simple lines can create so much opinion, I certainly wouldn't want to imply that mine is more correct or something like that. I'm actually surprised myself, because if I was told "much like the old one, but with some curves replacing angularity" I certainly wouldn't have expected that outcome.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0a/Gitlab_l...

I hope that's the old logo you are talking about. Much smarter than these new ones.

If Inter doesn't have character, then which font has character? How does one pick a font that has character?

Any font that doesn't try to be neutral. Consider Cooper Black, or Larken, or even the horrible Lobster. Even with sans-serifs you can be more expressive, for instance Px Grotesk.

Wow you're right, old one is impressive, I like it much more, and to me, it even resembles more a fox than the new one. Never thought about how cool those few lines can represent a fox so well and with personality.

Although I admit the concept and spirit of the new change makes sense.

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