Logo / Mascot Brainstorming

[bradcray]

Got an idea for a Chapel logo or mascot? Maybe something very specific (a rough draft?) or even just a theme or adjective or palette idea to share? This is an issue for capturing and sharing such brainstorming ideas.

[Note that since this is a public issue, there's no telling what might happen with your idea, so if it's something that you want to keep private, don't put it here].

[bradcray]

This morning, I woke up thinking that a chipmunk would be a fun Chapel mascot, in large part because it starts with "Ch", but also because they're cute and native to the Pacific Northwest (like Cascade and Chapel). Perhaps the chipmunk's would be named chippy or chipple to get a "p" and "l" in there as well.

I'm disappointed to find that (eastern) chipmunks (and thirteen-lined ground squirrels) are already featured on O'Reilly books (STL and C++ respectively), but that's not entirely given that it looks like they have 1400 books (!). I also don't know if it's necessarily problematic w.r.t. mascot selection.

[lydia-duncan]

I had an idea about a train connection, which I think would be fun

I think of Chapel as the Little Engine That Could. The story is from the 1930s so I'd be surprised if there was a copyright issue with it, but I wouldn't want us to directly use the iconography anyways because that feels a little gross. Still, I think the connection is inspiring

• Our story is one of resiliency, hard work, and determination, and I think that aligns really nicely
• It reframes our longer history as emblematic of the language’s strength rather than a liability

Independent of that:

• Trains were a big part of the industrial revolution and I think of Chapel as part of a computing revolution
• Trains denote speed, performance
• The tracks can symbolize the things that came before us that we built on (MPI, Fortran, UPC, etc)
• And it’s nice because it can also reference Michael’s talk from the first CHIUW, colloquially referred to as “The Train Talk” among developers at the time, so it also has a direct nod to our history

I made a little mock up when I had this idea. It's not very good (I am not a graphic designer) but I figured I should include it anyways:

[arifthpe]

I like the train idea and have some thoughts about it:

• I'd like to represent Chapel as either the engine or the entire train, whereas the mockup puts the name on a train car. I think it'd be bad to associate the language as being pulled behind something else that's doing the work, and good to compare it to an engine.
• Train tracks provide an easy visual metaphor/pun for parallelism, we could visually emphasize them.
• I'm concerned about the aspect ratio of the logo for fitting it in different applications like slides or on the website. Trains are much longer than they are tall, but I don't think we'd want the logo to be too long. Or we could have a variant of it with a different number of cars/no cars to adjust the length.

[lydia-duncan]

To make sure it doesn't get lost, note that #13 also contains several potential logo designs

[bradcray]

A random, probably-too-late, maybe not that appealing anyway idea I had the other day was: given the propensity of P in adjectives describing Chapel—parallel, productive, portable, performant—we should have the new logo be the "P" in CHPL/Chapel using the same stylization as our current C. :)

[DanilaFe]

A comment during the public meeting that talked about multiple, nested parallelism inspired me to draft some quick logo designs. The first one is inspired by a lavender bush (but blue, which is possible for lavender). The multiple interleaving stems, plus the multitude of small flowers on each stem, capture the elegance of parallel computing at multiple levels of resolution. Also, lavender is pretty.

A similar idea, once I got to brainstorming, was to lean on @mppf's "stalks of wheat" analogy. A single stalk of wheat takes months to grow, but you can grow a whole field in months by growing them in parallel. Like with lavender, each wheat stem has multiple seeds, which captures nesting parallelism as well. Also, these stems are actually parallel (as opposed to weaving around), which I think is nice.

These were sketched on a reMarkable tablet with no color support and very limited tools, and I don't know how to draw. So, they're more like proof-of-concept designs.