This is my design (I also designed the creepy smile) so it’s totally free to use. I have all the files somewhere and can make it vectors. Saw it on your blog and think it looks realy good small.
Would like to point out that the M and W are made out of 4 oblong eyes each… and whole thing is reminiscent of the copyleft symbol to me.
Happy to clean it up if needbe, the G/smile could be a little more proportional.
Discovered something new as I follow the tally so far on the @grinMW poll (please vote!):
The best part is this is just your simple, antique, humble, no frills, courier font with minimal editing. I also tried comic sans but good prevails over evil …
Almost all computers in the world have this font, and of all the lowercase G’s I found, this one is the most common, being present in more fonts sets than the other crossed-through-style in the poll above. Together, this makes this design the most universal I have found. There are also explicitly FOSS versions of the font, so if we like this one we can do it again in a few minutes completely open source, but it has likely been modified enough already to be used safely. The original IBM courier font is also totally free to use, so it is probably a non-issue.
If you want to test it yourself, simply copy the [ǥ] symbol and paste it somewhere and change the font to courier/courier new. Simple, minimal and scalable!
At the bottom are some of the things the logo evokes to me (making the circle yellow is really my only original contribution). @lehnberg has cleverly pointed out that the line passing through the letter represents the cut-through that makes mimblewimble special. The snitch is something Harry Potter values, and dandelion is the new node propagation technique. I also like the fact that the yellow circle is like a face without face, anonymous, grinning invisibly …
I’m not a designer, but here is my thought process. The main building block of MW / Grin is ECC (Elliptic Curve Cryptography), G in Grin could be secp256k1 base point G. Unfortunately it’s not very distinguishable from regular G. But what if we take some elliptic curve (over the real numbers of course) as a symbol? Like this one (in blue) - reminds me G.
+1 to bigkev’s comment, the logo must be different from anything else out there. I also like O-X’s avatar the best.
I’ll work on some variations to O-X’s avatar, e.g. different fonts for the eyes, ideas for the smile (maybe we can get a function in there?), different shades of yellow, etc.
I’ll probably work in SVG, easier for others to contribute changes that way (such as adjusting a color). We’ll also get a nicer history of changes in github (compared to a binary file).
Thanks for sharing these variations @Jason! For what it’s worth, I still prefer @0xb100d’s original, quite a lot.
It feels more warm, playful, and anarchic. The font (if it is a font and not just shapes?) in the original have some subtleties (not so rigid, not perfectly straight edges etc) that makes it feel more alive. As it is a play on the eyes of the original “smiley-face” I think it makes a lot of sense. Additionally, the smile is not going up all the way to 180º, but stops a bit short of that in order to resemble a smile a bit better. These are just my personal thoughts that stood out immediately when looking at these.
Now as a side-note, something that was discussed in Gitter, was the idea of being anarchic-by-design, and not have any “official” logo for the project. It’s a currency, we’re not trying to sell anything. The USD or the GBP has a currency symbol, yes, but there’s no logo. Smaller currencies throughout the world that do not have a symbol, still do not have a logo. The Swedish krona I think has something like 100:- to symbolise SEK or they just abbreviate to 100 kr. Still no logo. That does not mean that there should not be a logo, just that anyone can make a logo and there is no “official” one. Anyone is free to use whatever they like! “Let a thousand flowers bloom”, to misquote Chairman Mao.
I’m warming to this idea. The only real place I think might cause issues are in coinmarketcap-esque sites that expect a logo, need a logo, and then what if different sites use different logos? In any case, figuring out how to best handle these issues seems like a nice problem to have once mainnet is released.
I actually like the idea of having no logo at all. If that’s the direction, it would be nice to note that somewhere (ideally in Github), with a description for the rationale.
LOL it’s not that bad of a logo actually, i think from the first run of community of designs. I think it was Tromp’s even!
Maybe we can give it a bit more time (i will release a better file of the smileys) and then have a section on the site with recommended logos (for press)? but we can add somethitg cool about anarchy and the unimportance of logos ?
i wish my courier font logo had been better received (tromp liked it at least). it’s so simple, anarchistic and reproducible it just works so well.