On Wed, Jan 22, 2014 at 12:20 PM, Brandon Harris <bharris@wikimedia.org> wrote:

        (Pulled this out into its own thread)

On Jan 20, 2014, at 4:02 PM, Steven Walling <swalling@wikimedia.org> wrote:

> And one bigger thing... The lack of the puzzle globe when scrolling. I know you hate the puzzle globe and so do many of our designers. But it's a key part of our identity, and it's also a really nice large target for "home" on desktop. Thinking of this as a potential future default look, splitting the logo and wordmark on every page like that is a serious change. We should have a larger conversation about it I think internally. Either we do think the globe is an important part of our brand or we don't. If we think it's so unimportant as to remove it on scroll, then that has pretty wide implications for our branding I think.

        So, a couple of things:

                1) The puzzle globe - and ALL of our brand identity - *currently* goes away when you scroll past it on the page.  Retaining *any* branding is therefore good, in my opinion.  We’re actually ahead of the game here.

                2) We know that users recognize Wikipedia branding in the following order (Jay has the information about this):

                                * The Wordmark (WikipediA)
                                * The “W” mark
                                * Single puzzle piece
                                * The puzzle globe.

        The globe is the *least* recognized of our marks, which is interesting.  So by just showing the wordmark, we’re actually in-line with what is expected.

                3) Regardless of my personal opinions about the globe as a logo (I love its symbology, for instance), it’s *incredibly* difficult to work with because:

                                * It doesn’t reduce well *at all*
                                * Good logos do not have gradients (part of that reduction bit)
                                * It’s a 2 dimensional render of a 3-D model.  This rendering was done on a *white* background, which means that the interior shadows are all reflecting white.  Which means putting it on any other color background doesn’t work:  the shadows don’t look correct to the eye (particularly the shading inside the globe), which puts it into this sort of ‘uncanny valley’ of visual effects.  The viewer *knows* it doesn’t look correct, but isn’t sure why.

                Clearly, the Winter prototype has some work to do for non-standard logos (e.g., some wiktionaries, for instance).  What we’ll likely want to do in those cases is an image swap when the thing is supposed to come to rest.



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Brandon Harris, Senior Designer, Wikimedia Foundation

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