[Haskell-cafe] Re: Haskell Logo write-in candidate

[Jon Fairbairn]

Warren Harris <warrensomebody at gmail.com> writes:

> After spending a bit of time trying to decide how to vote, I
> ended up  deciding that my favorite would be a hybrid of
> several of the designs  (#9 & #49 FalconNL, and #50 George
> Pollard). It's probably too late to  include this in the
> voting, but here it is nonetheless:

That's quite nice, but the >>= lambda thing looks too busy
to me. What surprises me is that none(?) of the candidates
makes use of the "type" symbol. I'd like to see a version
something like yours, but with :: instead of >>=/lambda

::Haskell

means "of type Haskell", which is what we want people's
programmes to be. Colour it interestingly and choose a good
font and there you are. The interestingly coloured "::" on
its own would make a reasonable choice for a badge (eg for a
favicon).

 * * *

semi-rant warning:

This whole badge/logo business seems to me to be an
excellent example of Parkinson's law of triviality (choosing
the colour of the bikeshed). We have a large (too large)
number of variations on relatively few themes and a really
sophisticated voting system, but no very clear idea of what
they're for and no explanation (such as my "of type Haskell"
above) of why the candidates are the way they are.

I didn't join in much to the earlier discussion because I
thought things would work out to something sensible in the
end, but it doesn't look like that happened. Work out what
the problem is before putting the solution up for election!

I agree that the current badge is horrid (it looks like
something that rolled down a hill and collected some rubbish
on the way), but in the absence of a reasoned replacement,
the first step would simply be to get rid of it. Designing
these things isn't trivial, and while many of the candidates
are quite good pieces of art, a badge needs to be more than
that. Not that professional designers do better in general;
only a few of them are any good at it -- the rest rely on
most people not knowing pretty from appropriate and just
rake in the cash.

-- 
Jón Fairbairn                                 Jon.Fairbairn at cl.cam.ac.uk