A new Logo

[mabruzzo]

I recently messed around with making a new logo (largely as an excuse to play around with Inkscape). I was thinking we could use it in the README and in the docs.

I'm totally happy to make changes (we are definitely at the limits of my artistic ability -- its very possible that there are some obvious ways to change/improve it that I'm not thinking about.

Basic Design

I tried a couple of things and I'm sharing variations on the one I'm happiest with. The name of the game was "simplicity" (because I think it might age better and my artistic limitations).

Procedure for making the logo

For posterity, here is the procedure I followed:

1. I slightly tweaked the cooling_rate.py example to write out a .svg file (without boundaries or anything). This shows the cooling curve between 10K and 1e9K
2. I opened the file with Inkscape and I used the Path->Simplify tool to automatically simplify the representation of the curve. Originally it was composed of ~200 straight line segments. Afterwards, it was ~25 segment bezier-curve that did a good job representing the shape.
3. I manually simplified the representation of the curve (I was surprised just how intuitive Inkscape is). While I was doing this, I removed about 3 "wiggles" from the curve. The goal was to have something recognizable, and I think reducing complexity would help. At this point the curve is composed of ~10 segments
4. I also took some artistic license and slightly "extended the curves" below 10 K and above 1e9 K. To make the curve look smooth, I just moved the existing endpoints and tweaked the slopes at the endpoints to maintain the existing structure.

I was clearly inspired by the scipy and astropy, modulo the python's head. I tried to steer clear of using blue or orange to avoid too much similarity (but happy to reconsider).

I somewhat arbitrarily picked the Roboto font for the text. Honestly, I don't have a strong preference here. I just wanted a font without licensing problems (as I understand it, anything on Google fonts is "fair game") and I thought a san-serif font might look better. When I downloaded the Roboto font, it came with a bunch of variants and I think I used "Roboto Semi Condensed" (totally open to alternatives!)

I choose to color the font with a gray similar to the pytest logo (since it shows up against a white background or dark gray background).

I originally made the width of the curve a lot wider, but that looked pretty bad. We could probably pick something in between

Feedback

So what do you think? Are you generally receptive to this?

If so, what do you like and what do you want to change (please be specific)?

• logo color: do you like green? or purple? do you want a different shade? or a different color?
• how do you feel about the logo itself?
• styling of "Grackle": personally I like all-lowercase, but I'm happy to defer
• would you prefer a different font? (specifics help!)
• font color?
• anything else?

vector-format (transparent background)

rasterized-format with a white background

rasterized-format with default GitHub dark-mode background