I've always wanted to redesign the Drupal icon (druplicon). When I first saw the face in the water droplet, I was reminded of the Alien Heads that you often see in cheap t-shirt shops. I saw it and immediately said, "Oh, this is some code that's made by kewl L1nUx h@ck3r Ge3k5." But then I started playing with and thought, "This is really good." I installed it for iaslash and it stuck.
A few years later. I still find the Druplicon very geeky and un-serious. So on another thread where I played with some Drupal T-Shirt ideas for the guys going to LinuxTag, I said I would try to come up with a design idea for a Drupal logo. And here it is:
I played with the idea of water droplets. One of them tries to form the shape of a lower case "d". The other one reminds me of atomic models or planets orbiting in space.
This is coming to a head for me because an in-house client I work with on a Traction k-log is now looking at Drupal. On the surface, Drupal doesn't appear to target itself at the business community, but I really wish it would. So this is my attempt to make a less geeky looking logo. I don't think my water droplets are perfect, but the concept is there.
Comments
07/30/04 @ 04:56
Since drupal comes from the dutch word for drop, the icon is therefore in itself well chosen, but I definately agree with you that it definately has a ge3kY look. Too much of it actually.
But I think your drops are less recognizable as drops since they seem already to have landed. A beveled circle is less recognizable than the current logo. In my opinion it is not so much the shape of the logo - droplike figure - but thos geeky eyes that give it an air of underground coding. Maybe a mix between the current druplicon and some serious, more professional new style can improve the branding without sacrificing recognition.
07/30/04 @ 07:33
> But I think your drops are less recognizable as drops since they seem already to have landed
I don't know if one needs to be so literal in the expression of a water drop -- falling or landed. I agree that these drops are less recognizable as an icon. At a very small scale, they would be reduced to mere dots. But really, how important is the recognition of the connection to water droplets when compared with the association currently made with the program being a geek tool? I don't mean geek in a derogatory way here. I mean programmer/hacker geek, as in, if you're not one you won't be able to understand how to code this puppy.
I think that the mental associations made with the image are more important than helping people recognize that it represents the word drop. Look at the beautiful new BP logo. Through color and an association with the shape of the sun, BP transformed itself by shedding the literal logo with the letters "BP" and associating itself with a clean environmental focus. This is not to say that my attempt at water droplets associates Drupal with something different. I think it just removes the Alien association in my mind. Do I need to just "get over that"? :)
> thos geeky eyes that give it an air of underground coding
Perhaps if the eyes were just removed? (Sorry, I don't have the DAX font, so these are merely to illustrate the idea.)
But I don't know. These are experiments based on comment discussion with Steve. It's not reall that important to me personally what gets used in the end. But my opinion is that the current image may tend to drive people away. Of course, more important than this is the ease of using the program itself. :) That should come first.
07/30/04 @ 21:55
i think it's an improvement in terms of something that might make drupal more marketable professoinally.
as for tweaking it, the first one slants. the way the two bubbles are arranged with the italics lead the eye across the image. i like the second because of the vertical construction of the image on the left side.
at the same time, i would want the imagery to stand on its own icongraphically. it's less important to me that the drop symbolism be immediately obvious than that the icongraphic element have enough uniqueness that it would catch the eye as a symbol; that someone, not knowing what drupal is, would look at the imagery alone (without the term drupal) and wonder what the symbol referred to.
07/31/04 @ 10:34
Three alternatives from me:
Also, we should get rid of Dax, and choose a freeware font. Do not say "boo" just yet, there are several not-that-bad alternatives if you look carefully
08/01/04 @ 15:12
I like those variations, Kika. I'll see if I can do some of those and post them here later in the week. -m
08/03/04 @ 19:39
but i feel the drop already having landed give the idea of still, just lying there. Whereas a drop still suspended in air gives a feeling of energy and movement. (ianagd tho).
I think something like a drop that has just hit a puddle of water or something .. with waves coming from the impact. : http://www.sxc.hu/browse.phtml?f=view&id=161538
but once again.. i am not a graphic designer.
08/03/04 @ 19:48
I know you both hate it, but I've been working on the 3D druplicon some more:
The shape is tweaked and the darkest shade was lightened.
I'm glad that you guys are trying out some stuff on your own though. But I don't really like any of the suggestions so far.
Michael's drops are not very distinctive and hard to use due to the many colors and the transparency.
Kristjan's drop shapes are not very distinctive either. I also don't like the 'splat' feel in them. It makes me think of something or someone that wasn't attached properly and fell down with a large crash. Not the kind of 'drop' I'd like to associate with.
I do agree very much that the typography of the word 'Drupal' needs improving and I think this is more important than the graphic that goes along with the name.
Sort of related: doesn't the way Drupal presents itself have more to do with the organisation of the website (which suffers from information overload at the moment) than the logo itself? I think if we target the drupal frontpage more at non-users, and give the users and developers other pages to bookmark, we'd be much more friendly.
08/03/04 @ 20:21
> I know you both hate it
I actually don't hate it. What I was hoping for was to get away from that Alien image. I actually really like simplistic drop image best. Like the one used on drop.org: . But I was trying ideas with fallen drops because the circles suggested something else to me -- venn diagrams, footprints of little villages, molecular models, atoms moving in space.
> Sort of related: doesn't the way Drupal presents itself have more to do with the organisation of the website (which suffers from information overload at the moment) than the logo itself?
Absolutely. This is actually second in importance to a usable application. But I don't have the time to devote to cracking that nut. :( It was a great undertaking to work on that usability list. I can't imagine how much time it would take to organize an effort to redesign the Drupal site. I have too many other things demanding my attention right now, but I would love to help with IA and visual design if someone else took the lead as project manager.
08/03/04 @ 20:23
I'm not a graphic designer either (technically speaking). I like the idea of the post-drop ripples. Do you think I should try that? Not sure how I'd do it though.
01/23/05 @ 00:27
This is a problem with almost all OSS (or whatever the proper acronym is this week) projects from what I've seen. Geeks/developers/etc. just have very different ideas of what looks "good", or as often as not just don't give a damn. And sometimes actively disdain a "slick" site/design/identity.
I think this is why so much good work is left to languish, while software of questionable quality takes off because of well-done marketing and design. The obstinance against this by so many techs baffles me. You'd think they'd be pissed enough by now at being forced to use crappy stuff with good marketing, and decide to battle it on its own terms rather than the technical merits. I think the battle of marketing vs. technical merits is long over, but many refuse to hear it. But then they bitch "the client just chose it b/c of a pretty website". HELLO! Sigh.
I (and others) tried to work on a logo and site redesign for Python a year or two ago. Very painful. I will not be trying that again anytime soon, at least not without a much clearer mandate and a clear decision-making structure. I've been on the geek side and bitched about pointy-headed bosses, but dang programmers can put them to shame for stubborness and arrogance when they want to.
Until a project is led by developers and designers, not just developers this is going to be hard to improve upon it seems. If a designer can't overrule a developer decision (not an algorithm obviously) things are not likely to improve much. I'm pretty sure Gmail for instance was not done with programmers overruling UI people. Someone must have already pointed out a "designers are from neptune, programmers are from uranus" situation by now right?
I could go on but that's plenty. In short, I (and many others) feel your pain.
01/23/05 @ 04:39
And boy, do I appreciate that someone else out there hears me. Thanks, tag. I don't think that designers and programmers need to be so opposed to each other at every turn. I've learned a lot from the dialogue I have with some of the programmers I work with. But in large communities such as in open source development groups, it IS sometimes a bit hard to hold a conversation and appeal to common goals when the goals are so varied and hard to uncover in forum and email list discussion. It is for me anyway.
I've tried a few times to appeal to people to consider a re-shifting of the Drupal brand, but I didn't get the sense that too many people cared very much about appealing to the world of potential business users as one audience for marketing Drupal as viable software. In another instance, I had some discussion with an individual that didn't even understand the importance of appealing to the blogger community also as a potential target audience because Drupal, in that person's opinion, was not a blogging platform.
And so it goes. I'm a bit short on time and energy to champion these important issues, and so I fear Drupal loses some opportunity to leave a broader mark in several very important markets that could be better targeted.
-m
01/23/05 @ 16:41
I just came across a bug here I believe - the "auto-generate title from first words of comment" "feature" (I don't like it) doesn't strip out the opening textile tag. Anyhow...
[textile]
I fear the only chance of significant overhaul is the dreaded 'F'-word. Not the George Carlin one, but "fork".
But I doubt a fork would get much momentum behind it. And a strong argument against it:
bq. When programmers say that their code is a holy mess (as they always do), there are three kinds of things that are wrong with it.
bq. First, there are architectural problems. The code is not factored correctly. The networking code is popping up its own dialog boxes from the middle of nowhere; this should have been handled in the UI code. These problems can be solved, one at a time, by carefully moving code, refactoring, changing interfaces. They can be done by one programmer working carefully and checking in his changes all at once, so that nobody else is disrupted. Even fairly major architectural changes can be done without throwing away the code. On the Juno project we spent several months rearchitecting at one point: just moving things around, cleaning them up, creating base classes that made sense, and creating sharp interfaces between the modules. But we did it carefully, with our existing code base, and we didn't introduce new bugs or throw away working code. ( from "Joel on Software":http://joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html )
I think that last example of the Juno project is what Drupal should do; a project phase dedicated to housekeeping, organizing, documenting, and so on. But I suspect it will be hard to get that to happen for various (and valid) reasons. It would certainly be better than a fork though.
Maybe I will post this over at Drupal just for kicks. Since I've not really contributed much though, I hesitate even bringing something like this up, but (in my eyes at least) it's valuable outside input on how Drupal looks to non-developers and would-be new developers.
[/textile]
05/10/08 @ 23:30
Thats pretty good looking, I never really liked that drupal droplet face lol
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