The Haskell Wiki needs a new logo! (And maybe favicon?)

Hey everyone,

If you haven’t heard, the wiki was down for a while, and now it’s back. But along the way, we lost the old theme!

Besides needing to restore the theme, we need a new logo file.

Modern versions of Mediawiki (the software powering the wiki) need a square logo. The old logo was not square. It gets squashed and looks bad on the new site.

I’m no graphic artist. I’ve sparred with Gimp before, but I really don’t trust myself to chop up an existing image into a square. Perhaps you would like to help out?

There’s another thing, too. The Haskell logo is extremely good, and shouldn’t be changed. But I do wonder if we couldn’t have some way of differentiating the Haskell sites with some kind of tweak or flair. Especially the favicons! The wiki, this forum, Haskell.org, and the GHC GitLab all have the exact same favicon[1]. This makes my browser tab bar a mess. Can we do better?

P.S. A few versions of the standard “Thompson-Wheeler” Haskell logo are on the wiki (ha): Thompson-Wheeler logo - HaskellWiki


[1]: Hackage, Hoogle, and Stackage notably have their own distinct favicons!

5 Likes

How about using colour to distiguish one use of the Haskell logo from another? For example, the colour blue has associations that might chime with a wiki.

(EDIT: I think the Haskell font is Raleway Heavy and I picked this palette of blues.)

12 Likes

Instead of changing the colour/s of the current logo:

image

(from the website) change the background (colour, scene, etc):

haskell-logo_green haskell-logo_orange

with another option being to use the “all-white” logo with different backgrounds:

white-haskell-logo_green image

3 Likes

As for creating a square logo, you could do this:

  • get the SVG file from File:Haskell-Logo.svg - Wikipedia (which has a rectangular page)
  • open it in Inkscape (free)
  • set the File, Document Properties… so that the Front Page, Height is the same as the existing Width
  • Edit, Select All and Object, Group, to group the three elements of the logo
  • Object, Align and Distribute …, Centre on horizontal axis (Relative to Page), to centre the grouped elements
  • then you can File, Export, Page … to the file format you need (if you need other than SVG)

Colors are good!

I could even imagine a more starkly monochrome version, inspired by Wikipedia itself.

1 Like

For the Haskell Playground I had the same issue (Haskell icon good, yet it should be different somehow); I manipulated the colours a little bit, emphasising the “running code” aspect with a suggestion of >>:

playground favicon

I’m not saying this is a great logo per se, but just as an additional point of inspiration, perhaps.

7 Likes

I love this logo colour!!

1 Like

2 posts were split to a new topic: New Haskell Discourse logo

In case anyone else wants to play around with variations of the Haskell logo, I have implemented it here using the diagrams library. It’s not the most elegant code, but could be a useful starting point.

6 Likes