Logo for a programming language

mr17 Dec 2008

The Haskell community is looking for a new logo.

Haskell is a functional programming language, featuring laziness and purity. You don't have to know what these mean to help me. The current logo is pretty bad, in my opinion: you can see it at http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Image:Haskellwiki_logo_big.png.

I'd appreciate the comments of people from people whose geekiness tends towards design rather than mathematics, both on my own logo proposals and (if you have time) other proposals at http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Haskell_logos/New_logo_ideas.

Explanation of some symbolism: the mathematical theory of monads has had a big impact on Haskell, and this uses the operators >> and >>= which appear in some of the logo designs. A lowercase lambda is used to denote functions (and, less commonly, an uppercase lambda for a related concept of type-function). The language is named after the logician Haskell Curry.

Attachment	Size
haskell-logos.pdf	2.09 KB

mr17 Dec 2008#

In case all the comments about free fonts on that page bother you, please note that it's legally tricky for an open-source program to have a non-open-source logo. So free means free as in open source, not as in free junk (hopefully).

apankrat17 Dec 2008#

The principal comment I have is that the λ-based mark is probably not a very good idea simply because Lambda calculus is not unique to Haskell.

I think first two marks in your PDF and (this mark) are good, but they don't really associate with Haskell. Looking at the mark it's easy to see it's for one of the functional programming languages, but it could be for Erlang for all I care. In fact, the Lisp is going to be a more reasonable guess, because L is λ.

I would probably look at using a wordmark, perhaps working the λ or the >> into a negative space of "Haskell". At the very least I'd consider working the H letter into the graphical mark. The mark needs to be tied to "Haskell" somehow.

apankrat17 Dec 2008#

I gave in to the temptation and submitted my own entry. Max, thanks for the link !

litera18 Dec 2008#

Well the best ones to my eyes (and seeing them as logos that can be applied across various applications and are also memorable) were from "Jeff Wheeler" and the one that's also posted here from "Apankrat".

I think both of them are very similar in style and work well. And if I had to decide between the two it would be Jeff's.

Other's are either not logos at all, to playful/busy/unprofessional...

But if yours would be the one to progress even further I'd progress... Well I can't associate the arc with anything. And if I remove it, I'm with Jeff's version again. Well at least the third one is not appropriate.
___________
Robert Koritnik

aluminum18 Dec 2008#

I agree with litera, Wheeler's is quite nice. Epsilicon's is as well. Perhaps a tad trendy, but I was drawn to the 'gem H' logo as well.

mr18 Dec 2008#

Well at least the third one is not appropriate.

How so?

penn18 Dec 2008#

My vote is for Jeff Wheeler's.

penn

litera19 Dec 2008#

How so? Because it could be a logo for something else. Not Haskell. It doesn't resemble symbols you need to push forward.
___________
Robert Koritnik

mr19 Dec 2008#

Well perhaps it is a little generic but it does represent the >>= operator.

glazerlicious20 Dec 2008#

Stay away from the lambda sign (completely in my opinion, if you can) inside of a closed circle . . . when I saw the lambda sign I immediately thought of Half-Life.

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