Gutza-
Erik, a process works well if the result of that
process is a good
thing.
Indeed. Many people think it is. Many other people think it isn't. The
majority seems to favor the new design over the old one. So that's a
reasonable result -- we get rid of the textball and get a unified,
international logo for all 'pedias.
If you don't believe this was not a success,
look at all those people who don't want to "ratify" this design.
Obviously, none of the submitted logos was popular enough to win landslide
support. That has nothing whatsoever to do with the process used. It has
something to do with the submissions.
I understand that you're disappointed that your logo didn't win. I liked
it. But the simple fact is that many other people didn't. Many people
didn't like the gray circle, the "lamp" symbol is not widely enough
understood and generally carries different connotations, and so forth.
That's why it was rated lower. The puzzle sphere uses symbolism that is
very obvious, in your face. That will inevitably polarize opinions. But
our contest lacked a more subtle submission which carried meaningful
symbolism without being obtrusive (some people pointed out the sunflower-
brackets logo as such a solution, but the truth is that the sunflower
carries strong environmentalist connotations, which is why many people
voted against it). Logo 5e, while technically attractive, looks like a
tissue logo. Many people dislike ants. And so forth.
See, these are all arguments that relate to the actual submissions. They
have nothing to do with the process.
I find
that process superfluous after all this voting, but its results, or at
least its current status clearly shows the current decision is not even
remotely consensual.
Where did I say it was?
Instead of pointing fingers at people, design flaws
and technical
problems like many of us did in a previous thread (me included), I think
we'd better analyze the process and at least learn from this for the future.
I don't think there is anything fundamental wrong with the process used,
and no convincing argument has so far been made that there is.
My personal opinion is that the winning logo was voted
for mostly
because it's the one in which most people found something of their own
contributions: the proposal was on the first page,
I've already dissected this argument several times, would you please just
drop it?
While that may sound as close as it gets to the
WikiWiki-like style of
collaborative design, logo design doesn't really work like decorating
the Christmas tree.
For some people, it does. For other people it doesn't. Taste is
subjective. Obviously many people love the new logo -- see the comments.
That's a good thing. Many other people strongly dislike it. Hopefully we
can change this to "reluctantly accept".
Another problem I find is the number of choices in the
second voting
round for some versions. Take a look at versions 2a...2e in the list of
finalists:
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_logo_vote/Finalists
Really, do take a look. Can you imagine the winning logo going through
as "major" changes as the differences between 2b, 2d and 2e in this
final refinement process?
Possibly, the problem, however, is that the final refinement process is a
consensus process, so one or two individuals can make even the smallest
changes impossible. For example, JDG has already set a clear limit on the
amount of pixels distance he would be willing to accept between the text
and the sphere -- we will have to follow this limit if we do not want to
violate consensus. That's why I see this final refinement mostly as
experimental -- we don't know beforehand how many changes we can get
through.
The number of variants - 5 per user - seems reasonable to me. I do think
that some variants were unnecessary, but that was up to the artists to
decide.
Of course you can, there are insignifiant
changes between those variants. I sure can, I actually hope for even
more drastical changes in the winning proposal. Some of you might think
"oh well, even if we do a normalised average on the variants of proposal
#2, it still wouldn't win". Probably true (didn't do the math), but
people voted for the *concept* in proposal 1 and for the *finalized
logo* in proposal 2.
Not really. We would go through exactly the same process if any of the 2
variants would have won (try different color variants, arrangements etc.)
And most people did not really vote on the concept in proposal #1 -- check
out the many "1" votes which clearly commented on *this version*.
Again, I think the outcome of this contest reflects the quality and
diversity of submissions. I do not think that any other process would have
yielded a substantially more widely accepted result.
Regards,
Erik
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