[Wiktionary-l] Divergent Wiktionary logos

[Conrad Irwin]

Hi,

I personally like the new logo, but from the discussion on en.wikt,
we/they have resisted it so long that I suspect it would seem to be
losing face to back down now. I believe a portion of the resistance is
due to a rumour that Hasbro have some kind of legal claim to a
scrabble tile, and so we might be infringing on that; if that rumour
could be publicly debunked that would help.

The favicon I regard as a non-issue and is not really relevant here.
All(?) Wikipedias use an, almost universally recognised, globe logo;
they should have a globe favicon. Wiktionary doesn't have a clearly
preferred logo, but the W is about the only feature common to both
(though on the tiles I think it is a true W as opposed to overlayed
Vs).

Conrad

2009/3/25 Jay Walsh <jwalsh at wikimedia.org>:
> Hi all,
>
> Just wanted to second Cary's note - we talked about it briefly today.
> A single brand identity for the project would be so much stronger, so
> I encourage discussion on the matter.  I completely appreciate the
> challenges and how things have evolved up to this point, but it would
> certainly be worth a deeper discussion and resolution.
>
> Generally speaking we want to ensure all of the brand identities line
> up across languages.  I'm always impressed by the simple and elegant
> way the project marks get localized in other languages/scripts but
> still nicely translate with the visual style.
>
> Best,
>
> --
> Jay Walsh
> Head of Communications
> WikimediaFoundation.org
> +1 (415) 839 6885 x 609
>
> On Mar 24, 2009, at 3:20 PM, Cary Bass wrote:
>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> The two largest Wiktionary projects (English and French) have two
>> completely different logos.  [1], [2]
>>
>> The reason for this, from what I understand, is that a vote was taken
>> place about the logo fr.wiktionary currently has, on meta [3]; which
>> the English Wiktionary community chose not to be bound by, because
>> they, as a community, disagreed with the outcome.
>>
>> I understand that there are complaints that new logo has elements too
>> closely resembling Scrabble pieces, or are otherwise too cartooned to
>> some.  The "new" logo does maintain some visual identity as a project
>> logo, while the "classic" logo isn't really a logo at all, and
>> diverges wildly from project to project.  Of the top ten Wiktionary
>> projects, four of them use the new version, while 6 of them use some
>> variation of the classic version:
>>
>> fr: new
>> en: classic
>> tr: new
>> vi: new
>> ru: classic (a variation which little resembles the original)
>> io: classic (English version)
>> el: new
>> zh: classic (divergent variation)
>> pl: classic (divergent variation)
>> fi: classic (English version)
>>
>> As a whole, I seem to remember that Wiktionary is the second most
>> visited site of the Foundation's websites, and I really do think it
>> should be appropriate that the site should reflect a common visual
>> identity, one that the classic logo does a poor job of creating.  The
>> new logo, however, met with rather heavy resistance in, at the very
>> least, the English Wiktionary community.
>>
>> I do, rather strongly, believe that the Wiktionary identity needs to
>> be squared away, having some poll in general inclusive of, yet binding
>> of all Wiktionary projects, and then if that fails, starting the
>> process again, and succeeding to foment an individual logo like the
>> recent successful Wikibooks logo revamp.
>>
>> Cary
>>
>> [1] <http://en.wiktionary.org>
>> [2] <http://fr.wiktionary.org>
>> [3] <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wiktionary/logo>
>>
>
>
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