A Logo For GUADEC

Quim Gil announced about a month ago that, instead of having a different logo every year for GUADEC, the GUADEC organizing committee wanted to create a single logo for all future editions of the event and that it was organizing a design competition to find that new logo. That competition, which stipulates that the new logo should contain the word GUADEC and the GNOME foot, is coming to an end on January 31st 02006.

Generally speaking, I do like the GNOME logo. But I also find it extraordinarily hard to combine with anything, except perhaps for bold letters. I'm not sure why this is but I believe that it might be 1) because it is non-geometric and hence hard to anchor to external elements and 2) because it lacks a strong center or balancing point and hence is hard to align to external elements. Additionally, it is a fairly large mass of a single color or tone and therefore requires complementary elements to be at least as strong and pregnant as it is. Individually these characteristics are OK but the GNOME logo combines them all which throws me off every time I try to do something with it.

To be fair to Jimmac — he created the current version of the GNOME foot from tigert's original design — I want to make it clear that those reasons why I find it difficult to work with his logo are obviously subjective and only reflect the fact that my designer skills are limited. Many seem to have no problems (re)using that logo in their own projects.

Anyway, after a couple of weeks of trying to design a logo according to the rules I finally decided that I would leave out the GNOME foot and that I would instead create something that I liked, even if it meant that it couldn't be entered in the competition. At this point it wasn't about the contest anymore but about my completing this project for myself. One of my earliest ideas included a word balloon to represent the exchange of words and ideas taking place at a conference — someone else actually had the same idea. I reworked it to come up with this:

I believe the logo would work well in colors too and could easily be used to create t-shirts, bags and other conference trinkets. It could also be adapted to include, where appropriate, the name of the hosting city. The typeface used for the word GUADEC is FreeSans.