search

landley / toybox

toybox
http://landley.net/toybox
BSD Zero Clause License
2.42k stars 337 forks source link

Logo/Branding? #361

Open apprehensions opened 2 years ago

apprehensions commented 2 years ago

For example, BusyBox has this logo: image

landley commented 2 years ago

We've got https://landley.net/toybox/about.html#:~:text=logo but don't really use it much.

landley commented 2 years ago

And https://landley.net/toybox/toycans.png is a more useful version, the "big" one is just the raw photo from way back when. (Yes, both Coke Zero and Pepsi One have been discontinued since the project started...)

apprehensions commented 2 years ago

And https://landley.net/toybox/toycans.png

to be honest, i don't see how this fit's with the name. i would have imagined the toybox logo to be a box filled with toys.

landley commented 2 years ago

That png is just a photo of coke zero and pepsi one cans stacked up against a wall spelling out "toybox" in binary (ascii string, yes including a null terminator row). It's from 2006 and I don't really use it for anything (although I still have 2 of each can) because it really doesn't come up? What's the e2fsprogs logo? Does util-linux have a logo?

Linux's "tux" logo happened shortly after somebody else trademarked "Linux" and Torvalds had to sue to get it back (https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/2559). They were also competing with BSD (that sold books in stores with the red chibi demon on the cover) and Windows (that rectangular four panel swoosh thing) and people were starting to sell shrinkwrapped boxes of Linux (Red Hat 1.0 came out in 1995) so they were thinking about branding in a retail context during the dot-com boom.

It's partly a question of granularity: Android has a logo, but not dalvik, bionic, or minijail. Ford has a logo, and the Ford 150 is trademarked, but the transmission in the F150 (apparently the "Ford 6R") is... just sort of there? No logo I can find. Hasn't come up.

I'm aware that these days bug reports have logos (heartbleed, shellshock) but I've never really seen the point?

Do we need a prominent logo? I mean, we can...

Lots of logos are basically "company name in a specific font", sometimes with a circle around it. That includes IBM, Ford, Samsung, Coca-Cola, and in the software world packages like x.org and openssl. (Meanwhile I haven't even chosen a fixed capitalization for toybox because the command hasn't got any capital letters in it but mandatory all lower case is awkward at the start of sentences...)

P.S. Busybox's box logo predated my tenure as maintainer. (I think Erik Anderson needed a favicon.ico for the website?)

apprehensions commented 2 years ago

most projects do not really require or necessarily need logos, i just had thought that i would be quite nice to have some mascot or logo represent toybox.

terefang commented 1 year ago

image

apprehensions commented 1 year ago

Maybe a 2d/3d box with that?

terefang commented 1 year ago

that would be 16x16 image

hmm ... just (K)eep (I)t (S)imple (S)tupid.