Re: LilyPond logo?

[Flaming Hakama by Elaine]

Now, I don’t want to be seen as a curmudgeon, but I just knew this would spin out into this sort of thing at the very start.

Sorry, but this post is setting off my curmudgeon-o-meter.

 

As a person with a lot of experience in graphic design myself, I am sorry to say that this whole business is regrettable. The problem with modern computing is that suddenly everybody is a designer, everybody is a typographer, everybody is a publisher, and the list goes on, because we now all have the tools to do this sort of work. But what is usually lacking is professional insight and vast experience.

So, none of us should be engraving music, either?  Isn't that best left for professionals?

Really, this attitude is very 1990s.  Yes, desktop publishing (and now web publishing) has allowed for a deluge of content that is not formatted well. 

But there are two huge upsides:  1) now everyone can publish content;  2) along with ushering in lots of poorly-formatted content, huge amounts of *well-formatted* content has also come into existence, which otherwise would never have been published at all. 

Similarly, I wouldn't expect amateurs to produce a good logo.  But that doesn't mean they can't. 

Likewise, a professional isn't always going to do a great job--there are a great many examples of terrible logos designed by people with vast professional insight (the London olympics.) 

 

Making a logo by committee is, as I pointed out in my early post, hugely time consuning and expensive of people’s resources, and ends up universally in the lowest common denominator product.

If people here want to spin up logo designs, or comment on them, they are committing their own resources voluntarily.  No one is being diverted from more important tasks because of an interest in a logo.

That isn't, by itself, what determines a good logo.

The criteria for the success of a logo is not just whether it can be reproduced well in color or greyscale or not.  That is a worthy technical consideration.   And most amateur executions of good ideas can be fixed.

More important is whether the imagery supports the "brand" of the entity. 

 

I still do not see why the web graphic waterlily has suddenly been assumed to be the lilypond ‘logo’.

"a symbol or other design adopted by an organization to identify its products, uniform, vehicles, etc."

The waterlily adorns the public face of lilypond.org, and that no other image is used in connection with lilypond anywhere else.  So, on the one hand, it wins just by existence.

There are also good arguments for why the waterlily makes sense as a logo:  the waterlily draws a connection between the imaegry in the (rather odd) name lilypond.  Which is to say, if you are a lily in a pond, you are likely a water lily.  Water lilies have an appealing connotation, being a flower, and like music engraving, have a certain intricacy. 

My main comment on the recent icon-like b/w versions is that they lack a clear connection to music, which arguably would be important for a music engraving software logo, a problem not shared by the the existing picture version.

Here are the questions essential to furthering the project of a good logo:  what reaction should people have to the logo?  What message or connotation should it be communicating?  Simplicity, elegance, confidence, gee-whizzery, frustration, DIY, creativity, magic, durability, slight-of-hand, steampunkery, lyricism, geekery, endless rants?  When people who might be candidates for using lilypond run across materials with the logo, what type of impression should it convey?

These are the questions that should be explicitly discussed to help anyone who wants to work on logo design, be it "in house" or a professional designer. 

Assuming that the symbol is a waterlily, how should we *feel* when we see the waterlily?  Who is our potential market, what imagery do they respond to, and how do we convey our value proposition to them? 

These are the important questions at the heart of professional branding, which a designer will not be able to answer for us.  If we cannot answer them, then we are not in a position to fruitfully engage with a designer.
 

 

I still do not see the need for a ‘logo’ for scores. What publishing house puts logos at the bottom of pages? For a start it is pure noise - the less noise musicians have to deal with the better. Since lilypond is not a publishing house, you don’t need a logo for covers (such as Henle etc).

 

I do not want to be coerced into using an amateur designed graphic in my scores or work as part of my use of lilypond. Lilypond is fine without a logo. A textual acknowlegement is surely adequate.

 

Your desire to not use a logo in scores is not an argument against having one.  Although I agree with you that I don't see much typical use in the practice.

However, for any context where someone wants to do marketing for lilypond, it would be essential to have a logo available;  text-only attribution does not fully convey an appropriate impression for serious music engraving software (in my opinion).  Even text-based logos are typically designed;  rarely are they simply "just" using a particular font.

But if people have decided they must have one, then as Simon rightly suggests, get a professional, experienced logo designer to do one, someone with long practice in visual communications. But this seems to go against the open source nature of the project.

It doesn't matter who comes up with it, as long as it is good.  One of the best logos in existence is the Nike swoosh, which was designed by a student.

Most likely, we'll find something adequate through volunteers, iteration and collaboration. 

 

One could always say that I am free to not use a logo, but this argument, which will certainly be raised, is not valid in my opinion.

If you mean that a bad logo is not good for the brand, then I agree that a bad logo would hurt the brand.

But having a good logo is a benefit.

 

Logos are for branding and marketing. Why do we need one?

Because lilypond would benefit from a larger user base and more contributors, and that is likely helped by having effective branding and marketing materials at our disposal.

 

Andrew

David Elaine Alt

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