What should our next steps be w.r.t. the Chapel logo?

[bradcray]

The Chapel logo used as our HPSF announcement appears as follows:

At the time, the TSC voted to use this logo for the purpose of getting the announcement done in time for SC25, but reserved the right to tweak and improve it further once the rush to get ready for the event was over. Now that we're at that stage, this issue asks "What more should we do with the logo at this point, if anything?"

[bradcray]

Some concepts that have been put out informally, include:

• Shifting the gradient to include more green?
• Using a narrower font to spell "CHAPEL" to give it a more modern, sleeker, less blocky feel
• Trying to make the negative space representative of something (currently, some read it as "SLSL"
  • e.g., could we make it spell CHPL? Would we want it to? (related to issue Should 'chpl' be part of our project's identity for the long-term? #14)
  • such changes may also make it look a bit less like plugging in a motherboard to a PC, which struck some as too low-level of a visual metaphor
• cropping the logo to a circle to make it less blocky/rectangular:

At the last meeting, there was also discussion about going more extreme and doing new logo designs from scratch, though also a fair amount of pushback against that. I suggested that anyone wanting to champion that more radical direction open an issue proposing how that would work as I didn't have a vision for it that didn't feel like returning to square one or throwing out previous TSC decisions and votes.

[bradcray]

Here's a very poor, gradient-free sketch of how the negative space could potentially spell CHPL:

It's admittedly a little weird that the 'h' is the only letter that takes a lowercase form.

Note that, in all of these sketches here, and in the next comment, I'm imagining that there will always be two widths of positive and negative space, as in the original, and that the curves will be fairly uniform, as in the original. I just couldn't pull that off with my limited skills.

And here are a couple of rough drafts before I got to the above version, playing with different ways of doing the "C"

[bradcray]

Here's a version that combines the circular and negative space ideas from above (again, lacking the gradient because I'm not skilled enough to reproduce it):

And some earlier drafts:

[e-kayrakli]

It's admittedly a little weird that the 'h' is the only letter that takes a lowercase form.

I don't think we need to take having letters be written in whitespace too literally. Here's an even quicker version where a capital "H" is there (and obvious to me), but I guess maybe represented a bit differently than others?

We could also make "P" more prominent if we want to double down on the negative space idea:

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I am for making things more square, but feel relatively negatively towards a circular crop. It suddenly makes the logo look like a volleyball to me and diminishes the speed vibe you get from the slanted square.