Hello everyone,
A few weeks ago, probably more than I want to admit (but here! See! My
Notes! I've been up to something!), there was one of those, "OMG! Perl
is going to DIE!" threads, somewhere and the, "Well, do something
about it" call came out, and I sort of replied, "well, alright" and
gave my open ended hand to some design work.
Moritz was one of the first to guide it to the idea of making a logo
for Rakudo Perl 6 - as there's nothing yet (really) available. I
thought that would be a neat project and scratch some of my person
itches.
A slight background on me: I'm that guy:
http://xkcd.com/519/
(Although, there should be two more columns for, "Skateboarding" and,
"Rock Climbing" in there). I really started working with Perl during a
internship in college which started me in a full time job doin' the
stuff, which got me to where I am today: just working for myself.
In all of that, I also managed to get through Art School (guess what
paid for *that*!). A lot of my work deals with language and text,
writing and communication. Some of my work bordered on generative
work, but most of it stayed on the canvas, as I wanted to go to school
to learn to paint.
Anyways, I've always wanted to help out on larger-than-myself Perl
projects, but, although I think my perl-fu is, well, alright - it's
not wizard-like. But! I think an interesting niche that I could fill
is as someone who, "gets" Perl and it's wonderful and varied culture
and also, "gets" visual communication and all that. I am a firm
believer that a healthy community is one full of diversity and
successful projects come not out of one genius, but of many just
normal people, and that's me: just a normal person.
Here's some notes I've collected about what people have said Rakudo
Perl 6 is, which is a good baseline on what a logo should try to
reflect and communicate:
Rakudo Perl is:
Perl 6 on Parrot
Rakudo as a *implementation* of a *specification*
Rakuda-do (Japanese): Way of the Camel
Rakudo (Japanese): Paradise
Camels, Paradise/Oasis, etc. It's good visuals and it's easy to
digest. Camels are mean and smelly close up, but we don't have to get
all that close - it's good to remember they're also extremely useful
and in some places, absolutely critical to ways of life.
It also doesn't stray far from the original Perl 5 image of Camels and
Pyramids and all that jazz. The Japanese lean on all this seems
important too, perhaps to get a little more mindshare from the folks
that find Ruby interesting and attractive (more on that in just a
little bit)
One of the main fears with this name, "Rakudo Perl 6" - at least when
it first came out, is that describing Rakudo Perl as, "An
implementation (one of possibly, many) of the Perl 6 Specification,
built on top of the Parrot Virtual Machine", will leave people going,
"Huh?!"
I think this is a good reason as anything, to think of getting a
visual representation of this, somewhat complicated idea out ASAP.
It's interesting that Japanese Word(s) were chosen as the new name -
it's grown on me - I like it. Japanese Art and Poetry has the idea of
the, "haiga" and the, "gō" - which is sort of like a pen-name, but it
changes if there's a change in the style of the artist during their
career. You could think of, "Rakudo" as a new, "haiga" for Perl - at
least the concept makes things clear to me: we've changed course, but
it's still the same hand.
I was also, incidentally, doing some research on the origins of the
Latin alphabet - I'm very curious about languages in general - mostly
how they're abused in media and popular culture, but also in learning
new ones - I took a brief stint solo in France armed with a 5 week
Free University course in French to see how well I could get along.
Eye-opening.
I happened upon the book, "Mysteries of the Alphabet" (Narc-Alain
Ouknin - originally written *in* French) in the shelves of someone I
was hanging out with. It's main thesis, really is the Latin/Greek
alphabet started with something they term the, "Proto-Sinaitic"
alphabet, which was created around the time the lost tribe of Israel
was figuring itself out. Moses and all.
One of the, well, the third letter in their alphabet is, "gimmel",
which comes from the word gamel, which, if you didn't guess already
means, "Camel"! It looks either like the neck of a camel - or, perhaps
it's hump. If you think of, "gimmel" as our, "C" you can sort of still
see a hump of a camel, if you just turn the, "C" 90 degrees, clockwise.
Early written languages like Proto-Sinaitic are sort of the beginning
where pictograms that stood for what things looked like, where changed
into a way of writing about an idea - a lot of these early letters
still hold a lot of the original meanings. Hebrew, for instance still
does and each character is rich in back history. I like the Proto-
Sinaitic link, since it's less loaded quite as intensely as Hebrew,
which is invariably tied to major traditions and religions.
The, "Gimmel" character is no exception. Start from, "Mysteries of
the Alphabet"
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
:: Original Meanings
Carrying the Primal Power beyond, outside the domestic setting
:: Derivative Meanings
Outgoing, break, carry to another, do good, return a favor
:: Acquired Meanings, Perpetuated By The Hebrew Language
Ripen, Ween, Enable to ripen
Release Oneself, Break Away From
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Which I think beautiful illustrates a nice connection between Perl 5
and Perl 6, Rakuda-do/Rakudo and haiga pen-names - and the, "Big
Picture" of what exactly Perl 6 is all about - standing apart from the
lineage, but still being, well, "Perl", using the Camel (gimmel) as a
fundamental icon from way WAY back in time there -
and it all sounds so Perlish of picking and choosing the best from
many ideas and languages.
Taking a step back from this soup of ideas and thinking of a logo
itself, it seems that it would help to produce something that's made
of somewhat interlocking and inter-related pieces: Perl on Parrot has
two separate pieces that come together and complete an idea. But
there's other things that could take, "Perl's" place, so it's really,
$x on Parrot
It seems that if a logo would be made, we can modularize, say, that
Parrot part and use it for other things - same with the Perl part, if
you get into it. Modularization is a way of getting ready for the
future. It also allows us to be lazy: we can use other people's work
already and - well, you all know this already. It would be an
interesting idea to use common programming best practices in the logo
of Perl itself.
I bring that all up, because when I look at the various Perl projects,
they all look extremely interesting, but fragmented. It would almost
make sense to create a logo where pieces can be reused for related
thingies. Starting from a logo for Rakudo Perl, one could make a
simple Style Guide even, with easy-to-acquire graphic elements that
say, an application written using Rakudo Perl could use (at their
discretion) to enhance their own project and tie it back into Rakudo
Perl (and Perl in general).
So that's sort of the other thing I'm proposing: not only designing a
logo for Rakudo Perl, but having the concept of modularization of the
logo's basic elements part of the logo design itself and the sharing
and remixing of the design elements for related projects, to help
strengthen the, (and I'm not a fan of using this word)
"branding" (sigh) of Perl and making it not so much the "invisible
language that glues everything together", but have it where it
belongs: in a positive light with the general (geeky) public.
Right now, all that means to me is perhaps a simple style guide and
the image and graphic resources easy to grab in open formats. This
also means that simple-is-better when it comes to the design of all
these different elements of the logo, as they'll be combined in
interesting ways and things will have a tendency to be cluttered.
Simplification also lends itself to universality: the simpler the idea
is, the more we relate ourselves *to* the idea itself.
Finally, the design of the Rakudo Perl logo should lend itself to
change. Just like any other part of the project, the ideas and concept
and what the darn thing actually look like should be able to move and
change quickly - to be able to be upgraded - hey, why not? I'm not
interested in, "owning" the design, but am more interested in playing
a part in shaping the whole. And all that stuff. Just like in code,
some people do more than adopt a project.
What I really *really* need now is some feedback for any and all of
the above research and braindump. This, obviously, is just one regular
guy taking the first jump into something a whole lot bigger and more
complex than he can even really imagine. The first step is the hardest
and the most confusing - the rest of the journey is mostly, one foot
in front of the other, until the end,
Justin Simoni
Traveler,
http://justinsimoni.com
