Move away from pandas styling of the default (demo) theme

[jorisvandenbossche]

There are still some pandas specific things in the current default theme:

• The logo we use in the documentation (which also serves as a demo) is the pandas logo. This is of course not in the package itself (so doesn't impact users), but still by being in the docs it looks like it's from pandas. I don't feel the need to necessarily have a fancy logo for this theme (maybe mainly because I don't have much design skills/feeling .. ;-), but if someone else wants to have fun, I won't stop you), but we could also use a simple "PST" word mark in some font, to have something resembling a logo to demo in the docs.
• The default "highlight" color of the active navigation (--pst-color-active-navigation) and h1 header is the purple of the pandas logo. I think ideally we would use another more neutral color in the default theme (so pandas can use the color as customization). Unless others have grown used / like the dark purple and would like to keep it, of course. One option would be some shade of blue (eg like sphinx-book-theme uses https://sphinx-book-theme.readthedocs.io/en/latest/layout.html), or even just bold black.

[bollwyvl]

I'm happy to take a crack at some logo-like treatments. Seems like having something that is n x 1.6n for the logo and n x n (for a favicon) would meet the need. Bringing in the pydata tesselation blocks, too, probably isn't terrible.

Regarding default colors: #294 suggests the best thing we can do is to go for as much contrast as we can in the defaults, as folk will often keep them. I think monochrome is a very good place to start, as it gets us entirely out of the perceptual color space, as things like color-blindness become someone else's problem... if they want them.

[bollwyvl]

Here's a very monochrome look
	it sorta follows some rules... kinda like it, will do some more thinking

[bollwyvl]

Here are some that riff on various co-branded colors, and intermediate values...

[bollwyvl]

Of humorous note, the "p" and "d" are actually examples of the sphinx tiling. It's hard to make "s" and "t" out of them, though!

[jorisvandenbossche]

Cool ;)

In your monochrome logo idea, is there some "idea" behind it? (the left part is the pydata logo, I think)

For your second set, I tried something with the left-most one (or "massacred" it ;)), making it a bit simpler (only 3 colors, and leaving out the "d", so it's just "pst"), although now the "p" is not a real sphinx tile anymore .. (because I made it a bit longer, otherwise it looked strange):

(for some reason the colors chagned, but so it was meant to be the same three colors from the left-most logo. I assume easier to change with a proper vector file ;))

[bollwyvl]

Feel like we're getting somewhere.

It's just a couple inkscape files, I should have made a gist of them, sry! Will do so this weekend.

[choldgraf]

I have no idea whether https://github.com/pydata/pydata-sphinx-theme/issues/373#issuecomment-815343065 is good logo design or not but I really enjoy looking at them :-)

[drammock]

I couldn't resist getting in on the fun:

[bollwyvl]

Love all the ideas :heart_eyes:

Here's the rough inkscape SVG i've been working with: https://gist.github.com/bollwyvl/2976fe88aabf03a8e020166c383b45e4

I'll update with the new suggestions...

[jorisvandenbossche]

I know logo's are fun ;), but I also asked about default colors. @bollwyvl answered:

Regarding default colors: #294 suggests the best thing we can do is to go for as much contrast as we can in the defaults, as folk will often keep them. I think monochrome is a very good place to start, as it gets us entirely out of the perceptual color space, as things like color-blindness become someone else's problem... if they want them.

With "monochrome", would that mean taking a bold black for highlighting the active navigation? (or near-black, in any case less grey as the default color for all navigation items) Although it could also be monochrome using shades of some other color.

[bollwyvl]

Right. An interesting approach would be an alternate palette specification that only specified the s and l and a of the hsla palette, and defaulted a small family of h to 0. So it'd be very easy to have a "purplish" theme by changing one value. Similarly, it could offer a couple h values for for accent, danger, etc.

Indeed, with a few more widget pieces, this could be a static form on the docs site, or at worst a binder with colour that generated a compatible conf.py and custom.css.

[12rambau]

When #623 will be closed it will be way easier to change the colors of the theme, This conversation has been on pause for a year, is there an agreement that came out on the logo and thus the color scheme to use ?

[drammock]

I've been away on leave, during which I played around a bit with my earlier logo idea. I dunno if adding more options will help move this along or slow it down, but I'll share them here. It's basically one design with 2 variants on the shape of the "T" and 3 different spatial arrangements of the letters.

one

two

three

four

five

six

Personally I like number five best, because of the two negative-space triangles and because if you view the letters as 3D, the "T" is going a different direction.

[choldgraf]

I like four because it's similar to five, but more horizontal so will fit more neatly into standard logo placements. I don't have super strong opinions though

I'm +1 on changing the primary and secondary colors for the defaults to be "pydata blue and orange", and adding one of the logos above. We could also try making the menu text "pydata grey" but that might be too opinionated 🙂

[12rambau]

agreed with @choldgraf, if we want to use it as a favicon it needs to be as compact as possible and I think the "slope" of five will prevent that.

Note that when I try to watch them as 3D, my brain goes crazy with the double folding of the "S", which is fun 😄

[damianavila]

I agree with @drammock on option 5... but the compactness of the 4 option, I think, wins in the end 😉. And I see @choldgraf already has a PR with option 4 on it in #698.