NetBSD Announces Logo Design Competition

jschauma writes "The NetBSD Project has announced that it has launched an international competition for the creation of a new logo. There is a cash prize of US $100.00 for the winning entry. The successful logo will also have wide exposure, featuring in all NetBSD material including, but not limited to; the NetBSD.org web site, software media, apparel, and business systems. The competition will close on February 29, 2004. The rules of the competition, submission information and the design brief can be found in the official announcement, which has already spawned some discussion on the netbsd-advocacy and current-users MailingLists." The announcement notes that the current logo is "too complicated... hard to reproduce... [and] has negative cultural, and religious ramifications."

Looks fine to me!

[CaptainAlbert]

> too complicated...

for whom? for what?

> hard to reproduce...

== hard to forge...

> [and] has negative cultural, and religious
> ramifications.

No, it doesn't. It's a cartoon devil. It doesn't offend anyone. Really. Unless you're one of those freaks who won't let their kids watch Scoobie-doo because it's got ghosts in it. Trust me. If it were hanging on a cross or wearing a turban, *then* maybe it'd need changing.

Sheesh!

Re:Looks fine to me!

[dave420]

It's a devil. Devils are evil. Cartoon or not, it's a symbol with evil connotations, which some people could feasibly find offensive.

For any sort of organisation to have a logo which could cause offense isn't a good start.

After all, with your logic, a swastika is just a bunch of lines... how could that offend anyone?

Re:Looks fine to me!

[KillerLoop]

*not* the BSD devil, check out the link given in the story.

Re:Looks fine to me!

[Yorrike]

What's wrong with wearing a turban?

It's not that they're devils ....

[binaryDigit]

Several people have posted (in the usual /. manner) that they don't see an issue with the devil, it's a cartoon, right wing religious wackos, etc. Well its not the devil, it's what the devils are doing. The devils are in a pose that mimics one that is usually associated with valour and the giving of ones life for "liberty" (whether or not you agree that this particular pose does or not is for another discussion). So now you have a logo that uses characters associated with negative deeds (the devil, cartoon or not) in the place of men associated with honor and self sacrafice. Given the current events, I could see how this logo, while passing under the radar for many years, is now suddenly considered inappropriate.

I can understand how many would find it inappropriate, which is unfortunate because for those who've been around the BSD and the computer scene for a while know exactly what the logo is trying to represent and it's quite accurate in that regard.

Re:Looks fine to me!

[AllUsernamesAreGone]

"It doesn't offend anyone."

Okay, I challenge you to wear a BSD t-shirt and walk around several south-US states (texas would be a good one).

Trust me, those religious nuts will have you arrested. And bring the asbestos underwear because they'll probably try burning you as a devil worshiper...

IMO the devils logo is good, the more religious nuts it pisses off the better - maybe someday they'll realise how rediculous they sound. Although I doubt it.

(/me wonders how long it'll take for this to get modded as flamebait.. meh, I've got karma spare..)

Re:Looks fine to me!

[Ubi_NL]

No, it doesn't. It's a cartoon devil. It doesn't offend anyone. Really. Unless you're one of those freaks who won't let their kids watch Scoobie-doo because it's got ghosts in it. Trust me. If it were hanging on a cross or wearing a turban, *then* maybe it'd need changing.

It has nothing to do with the devils. It's a cartoon of a statue in which american soldiers are planting an american flag. That makes it culturally biased.

Although you have to be an idiot to be offended by it, loads of people (especially in some 'liberated' countries) are suchs type of idiots and there is no reason to get into this unnecessary type of trouble

In contrast to the bashing

[Max Romantschuk]

I believe this is a good idea, from a branding standpoint.

The loss of the BSD daemon may be unfortunate, but looking at major brands it's pretty clear recognition doesn't require a cool mascot. To name a few: Nike, Adidas, Mercedez-Benz and Nokia all have rather simple comporate symbols.

If the NetBSD project wishes to look more professional in the eyes of marketeers, this is a good move.

Re:Looks fine to me!

[Ashtead]

The single cute "cartoon devil" (whose name may or may not be Chuck) [mckusick.com] that we see here on slashdot as the section logo for BSD, and which is really meant to be a visualization of a daemon, is not what's under consideration here. As a symbol for BSD, it is about as well-known and effective as Tux is for Linux.

However, these angry troll/devil hybrids in sneakers trampling over what appears to be a lot of desktop computer hardware [netbsd.org] however, is evidently what is found in need of an update.

I can list a few likely reasons for changing this, off the top of my head:

One thing is that devils is a somewhat religious device, not found in all religions.

Then there is the aesthetics of this. The logo is just kinda ugly. These guys are not all that different in appearance from some football hooligans... and after all, there is a strong element of marketing here, whether we like it or not. Would you want to buy an operating systems from these guys?

Political correctness or accusations of same, marketing and aestetics aside, I would say it is just as much that the design of the monitors is becoming dated, since many of us now have relatively skinny LCDs, not fat CRT-based ones. If nothing else, the logo is becoming tecnically dated.

All these could, individually, be considered warrants for change.

Re:Looks fine to me!

[EinarH]

Trust me, those religious nuts will have you arrested.

Yeah, but that is because they dropped out of school. If they had had any historic sence they probably would have recognized the original picture [rootsweb.com], and then it would have been okay for them.
(and let us not get into the discussion on wheter the picture is fake or not, that's offtopic)

Re:angels?

[perly-king-69]

So now we're going to change it to angels, i hope?

Wasn't the devil just a corrupted angel anyway?

Re:Only idiots would find it inappropriate

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps people should get their heads out of their politically correct backsides and get a life instead of worrying about this sort of thing.

Hmmm, who needs to get a life and stop worrying about this sort of thing? It's THEIR logo, THEY want to change it for whatever reason THEY have, who are YOU to say what is a good reason or not? What next, hyprocrites telling organizations what is and isn't a good reason to change logos?

POT/KETTLE/BLACK

Re:devil?

[lederhosen]

What's wrong with it is that some deeply religious people consider it a symbol of evil, and make stupid assumptions about people using the logo or wearing it on t-shirts etc., such as believing them to be satanists. It might not have been a problem if people knew what BSD was, but for most people "NetBSD" is as meaningful as a string of random characters.

And? I do not think we should care for fanatics.

Re:Looks fine to me!

[gad_zuki!]

>Okay, I challenge you to wear a BSD t-shirt and walk around several south-US states

And I challenge you to walk around the south while being black or gay. Just because people take exception to something doesn't mean its wrong or should be changed.

Re:devil?

[chadm1967]

Yes, you're correct. To us "Geeks" and "Techies", it's a deamon. To others, that know nothing of BSD, it's a devil.

Re:Looks fine to me!

[fiddlesticks]

> Unless you're one of those freaks who won't let
> their kids watch Scoobie-doo because it's got
> ghosts in it. Trust me. If it were hanging on a
> cross or wearing a turban, *then* maybe it'd need
> changing.

Yeah, your culturally sensitive input really helps

> It's a cartoon of a statue in which american
> soldiers are planting an american flag.

> Although you have to be an idiot to be offended by it,

Or hate America? Or hate war? Or hate stuff which has _nothing_ to do with NetBSD? and so they don't want to mix an OS up with the US military-industrial-complex?

Man I can see why they wanna change that logo.

An opportunity...

[pschmied]

...to raise awareness about one of the cooler OS projects out there shouldn't be wasted.

I know that the conventional wisdom is:

• FreeBSD is for servers
• OpenBSD is for firewalls
• NetBSD is for obscure hardware

But, in reality, NetBSD runs on so many platforms as a side effect of their stated policy to implement things the Right Way rather than ever relying on hacks.

NetBSD is one of the cleanest, most logical, and most innovative open source projects out there.

For example, NetBSD takes an insanely good idea (the FreeBSD ports collection) and makes it even better. Pkgsrc (NetBSD's answer to ports) is built in such a way that allows you to run it on Solaris, Linux, and a number of other operating systems. Plus it has a built-in package security auditing tool.

FreeBSD et al are moving toward NetBSD's innovative init system which in my mind combines the power of SysV and the ease of use of *BSD.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe NetBSD was the first OS anywhere to support ipv6.

NetBSD always seems to chug away in relative obscurity, with even BSD folk ignoring and misunderstanding it. Yeah, it's great for embedded work. Yeah, it'll run on almost anything. But it's also a really great workstation. And their uncompromising approach to quality and correct implementation make it a very stable and logical general purpose OS.

So, I for one welcome the new logo, and hope that it helps to bring NetBSD out of the shadows and allows my fellow open source users to enjoy another excellent operating system.

-Peter

Re:Looks fine to me!

[GypC]

The south is full of black people, and mostly we get along fine. Black people had a saying in the 60's, "Northerners love the black race, but can't stand black people. Southerners hate the black race, but get along with black people just fine."

Texas also has a lot of openly gay people. Haven't you ever heard the expression "steers and queers"? ;-) There is truth in it.

Another ignorant yankee...

The main problem is...

[instruktlab]

Ok, it seems to me most people here don't seem to look at logo design from an ease of use or professionality standpoint, let alone from a design aspect. Everyone seems to be skating around the fact that with exception to the religious or mythical issues and the problem with a off-the-wall politcal cartoon feel, the design itself is quite the opposite of a business/ease of use point-of-view. Sure it's open source but NetBSD is in the "business" of supplying an open source medium for its users to enjoy and interact with. If anything the logo should almost have a conservative corporate fee, with just a wee bit of open-source attitude to the side just to show that open-source is the sort of black sheep child of the WWW network infrastructure not to mention the software world. So keep your minds open guys. This is a world-based community, and there's probably someone out there offended by the spoof of the Iwo Jima memorial and there could also be some "religious stiff" offended by the devil/daemon aspect. Also remember that the general public doesn't know anything about the greek background of language and their english counterparts, let alone would they really want a lecture on it. When designing you have to take the audience seriously but not yourself too seriously. Creativity can come in spades but if you don't know how to apply it properly it won't get you anything but trouble.

Re:devil?

[Artifakt]

It's not just deeply religious people, or computer illiterate people, or people who leap quickly to stupid assumptions that make this logo a problem. First, the name isn't clear or catchy enough to be widely recognized, so the devil image becomes all most people have to go on. Imagine running across the person wearing a Duke Blue Devils sweatshirt, but the First word is "Forxgnarb", you've never heard the term before, there's no thing or place named that anywhere nearby, and when you ask what the blue devil stands for, the first things you hear are all about vaguely political issues, as seen by some small minority organization. How stupid is it really, to jump to the conclusion the sweatshirt wearer is in some cult?
NetBSD isn't going to get brand recognition from the word, just like Adidas didn't build brand recognition just on the word. It sounds too odd for that. Like Adidas, it's competing against words that have more relevance to the area (Microsoft sounded like computer stuff way back when it started, with words like software already paving the way for recognition - Nike is the greek goddess of victory, as most Olympic atheletes know).
If anything, the cuteness of the logo works against it more than an association with evil. It's a Warner Bros toon style devil. That's already saying "fine for home users, but would you trust a business to it?".

Re:Lame and geeky logo

[that _evil _gleek]

What's so wrong with Pencil? Abstract wierd font logos is very 1980's IMO.
EA's (Electronic Arts) Logo was the best of the genre, and I feel that that really thats stuff has become cookie-cutter, mainly complained about by Comerical Artists looking for work... As far the GNU ... regarding Net's logo, it isn't the pencil in itself, but the fact that its large, and doesnt resemble the classic beasty, and as someone said in another thread they resemble the noids... The thing is too big
To /some/ extent pencil art from an actual contributer to the project to me has more value than a formaliac profesional going-rate-per-hour work. To me that kind of abstract type face logo stuff, has been doon so much, so many tools to do just, that its hardly even applied art, but has become a very /safe/ , bland, choice.

Re:Death Cookie

[aWalrus]

Jack Chick is full of shit in more ways than I can count. A lot of the stuff in that tract is a good exposition of the systems of control that the catholic church uses, but it's ignoring and corrupting the basic premises that support those sacraments. Furthermore, the idea of a vengeful god that rules by fear is somewhat outdated in the catholic roman Church (old testament stuff). Salvation (or the wafer thing) is not to be denied arbitrarily in order to acquire power. Furthermore, what is exposed there amounts to finding an example of a pedophile priest and jumping to the conclusion that all priests are pedophiles.

Check out some more of the site. It's basically a collection of hate speech (particularly against gay people) in disguise of religious teachings.

Re:devil?

[boog3r]

Quick nitpik - it is "Athena Nike" that is the Greek goddess of victory. Athena took a couple other forms too, like "Athena Parthenos".

Hey... A unixlike OS for a PC doesn't mean P.C.!

[Quixadhal]

Hmmmm, troll looks HUNGRY.. guess I'll toss a bone.

I, personally, am deeply offended by the insane attempts of far too many otherwise intelligent people in this decade to bury the age-old stereotypes, differences of belief, and general feelings beneath a very thin veneer of political correctness. What's so wrong about being honest?

I'm not against integration, and I cherish diversity. Learning about other cultures is a good thing, but pretending they aren't different when they are is stupid. If wearing a red shirt is offensive to the group of people who were extras on ST:TOS, should everyone stop wearing red shirts because they MIGHT feel bad? I'd suggest that those people who become upset over P.C. issues should ask themselves why they're upset... and maybe grow up a little.

Where are the Satanists to defend their beliefs? Seriously, if Christians can get all bent out of shape at the logo of a devil, why can't Satanists demand that the cross be banned from public display because it offends them? Either it works both ways, or not at all.

The logo in question is being dragged through the mud because a few religious zealots woke up and started looking at free operating systems and saw a devil? What, are they so stupid that they assumed this literally meant "Satan Inside"? Didn't the cute smile tip them off about the concept of caricature?

I checked my calendar... it's not 040401 yet, and 040104 has passed (YYMMDD anyways), so let's repost this when the time is right.