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Comment by kristopolous | Hacker News Reader

I see it as part of their charm - speaks to the homebrew, grassroots, piecemeal nature of them.

Not too slick and not too polished.

For instance, I feel that the artistic execution of the old NetBSD and FreeBSD logos really felt inline with my perception of the projects themselves. When they were replaced with thought-out carefully designed ones, in my mind, this abstract connection was lost.

git did this recently too. I preferred the tree-eating monster and vertical logo - it had so much more character and soul than the current look does.

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> I see it as part of their charm - speaks to the homebrew, grassroots, piecemeal nature of them.

Which also incidentally are words many people would not want their projects to be associated with.

> git did this recently too. I preferred the tree-eating monster and vertical logo - it had so much more character and soul than the current look does.

The old one might have had "character" but the new one looks professional and the whole new image that git has nowadays makes it a ton easier to pitch to non developers. Why does the whole idea of appearing "professional" have such a bad attitude among certain developers?

I don't think it's about professionalism. It's about aligning the presentation with the reality.

I believe such designs are appropriate and well-suited for all-volunteer, community-run projects and there should be no generalized push to change them.

git may not have been the best example - but I did really like the monster.

> Which also incidentally are words many people would not want their projects to be associated with.

Then those people can use different logos for their projects?

> Then those people can use different logos for their projects?

They are. FreeBSD and git for instance changed their logos. Everybody is free to use a logo of their choosing, but they have to accept that others will make comments about them.

Sure, and I can make comments about how git's new logo looks unprofessional, like a logo of a freemium Android game. But is this a good use of our time?

  Why does the whole idea of appearing "professional" 
  have such a bad attitude among certain developers?

Professionals get paid, so professional projects need to make money somehow.

If someone plans to make money, and I can't see how they plan to make money, and they offer me something for free, I gotta wonder if they're going to start charging me, discontinue or pivot the project.

As a graphic designer I agree, and wrote on this before:

http://i.liketightpants.net/and/my-favourite-logo-ever-is-fo...

> I heart the complete absence of symbolism. And the departure from traditional corporate marketing is all the more exciting because it rhymes with the product itself. GNU Pascal is open source software: it is changeable and redistributable at will. As such it is built more on the values of the academic world than on the traditional corporate ethos. And while visual identities for open source software tend to be pale imitations of corporate aesthetics, GNU Pascal is one clue of how such software could find a style of its own.

Indeed, as was discussed before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4551907

I really like the atmosphere of the old git design[1]. The new design[2] is so corporate and soulless. Open-source projects can afford to look more human than companies, I'm happy that they do.

[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20090303081943/http://git-scm.com...

[2] http://git-scm.com/

hmm, the logo's don't look like some giant-and-evil inc. is trying to sell you something so this could really appeal to the target community. makes sense.

I remember reading an article about discount supermarket chains where the designs of the product packaging and the store itself were intentionally made cheap-looking to communicate the message "you pay only for the product, not for the fancy packaging, advertisement or store".

So the logos of GNU maybe communicates just the right message instead of looking fancy.

I think that's right for some of them. However, a few of the logos I looked at and thought "wtf?"

This isn't unique to GNU projects or open source, and I don't think these are worse than other ones I have seen in other contexts.

I agree. Another one is the rsync logo, which also works as a good image of its functionality.

http://rsync.samba.org/

git has a logo? Ditto for most of the other projects. I have recognized the Gimp horned-dog-or-whatsit (and that only because it's on the splash screen); for the others I use, it's approximately the first time I have noticed it.

(Cue wild speculation whether that signifies a need for a better logo, or whether each and every piece of infrastructure needs to have its own corporate identity manual)

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