[Actionchix] Logo ;)

[Akkana Peck]

I absolutely love Clytie's daughter's drawing! I suppose it might
not be best for a logo; for one thing, she's a little scary (I like
that, but it probably isn't the image we want to project; she
doesn't look like the embodiment of "be polite, be helpful" :-).
But it's a wonderful drawing and I'd love to have it on a t-shirt,
or as an alternate logo.  And I sure wish I could draw like that!
Wonderful stuff!

Re the robotic tuxes:
Obviously everybody loves the concept, but I have some worries about
the sketches themselves. I do understand they're just preliminary
sketches, so I'm mostly noting points I hope the artist will
keep in mind when taking these to the next step.

First, they're rather complicated. I showed them to my mom, and
she had no idea what they were showing. She couldn't figure out
that it was a robotic penguin or that the woman was controlling it:
the hands on the control sticks are just so tiny that they're hard
to see if you don't have good vision, and the woman is such a small
part of the whole logo that it's hard to see why her eyes look so
funny (that she's wearing some sort of goggles). That was on #1;
the same issues are more extreme on #2 and #4 (mom couldn't even
see those after the concept was explained).

It might be partly that I'm viewing these on my small, high-density
laptop screen, so they're already pretty small here. If you're
viewing them at 100dpi or less, try standing across the room to see
whether the logo still works for you at a small size, or would work
for people whose vision isn't that sharp. Even if you don't care how
it looks to low-vision people, it gives you an idea of the first
impression new people will get from a quick glance at the logo.

#4 just plain looks creepy to me, as though she's popping out of a
penguin's brain. I like that she's a bigger part of the image, not
just a tiny rider on the penguin, but I can't get past the brain
surgery imagery. Ick.

The other concern I had was about colors and shading. Val already
said that these were just preliminary sketches, and the final
version would be "crisp and bold" in whatever colors we thought
appropriate. That will help a lot: the smoothly-shaded sketches
look like something that would be quite difficult to make into a
t-shirt (think small embroidered logo that can only use a few colors),
or a small transparent gif to put on a website.

Careful choice of colors might help with the first problem, too: if
the chix' hands are flesh-colored and the sticks are dark or silver,
obviously contrasting, and the goggles are a different color from
her face, and the mechanism in the robot's leg is silver, maybe that
would make it more obvious.

Re the lettering: 6, 9, and 3 all look pretty (I actually like 8
better except that the L isn't obviously an L to me) but I have a
question: are they hand drawn, or are they using specific fonts?
If they're using specific fonts, are those fonts licensed so that we
can use them in different ways or at different sizes? I ask because
Debian at some point in the distant past chose to use a logo font
that isn't free, so anyone who wants to make variants on the logo
has to go buy this font from somewhere. Let's please not do that.
With any luck Val's friend is already aware of these issues and
wouldn't use commercial fonts for a free-licensed logo.

	...Akkana