From matt.mattarn@gmail.com Fri Oct 27 12:07:09 2006 Received: with ECARTIS (v1.0.0; list llg-board); Fri, 27 Oct 2006 12:07:10 -0700 (PDT) Received: from ug-out-1314.google.com ([66.249.92.173]) by chain.digitalkingdom.org with esmtp (Exim 4.63) (envelope-from ) id 1GdX2g-0007tZ-4w for llg-board@lojban.org; Fri, 27 Oct 2006 12:07:05 -0700 Received: by ug-out-1314.google.com with SMTP id 23so849637ugr for ; Fri, 27 Oct 2006 12:06:54 -0700 (PDT) DomainKey-Signature: a=rsa-sha1; q=dns; c=nofws; s=beta; d=gmail.com; h=received:message-id:date:from:to:subject:mime-version:content-type:content-transfer-encoding:content-disposition; b=e90AAhE0cwwzCvzpGIqiYmzIK1+pFztfScuh8hvHZlsw36quK9TOwBlnYu15WuGvHtD5jdcL30XgIFT1beXdqf44Gw/txfIJyBWWzPPe3V/VWOYusvwXwtNDCyOVOd3x7Y7a726jdFHY4IIgxfanoe8GVlqxzYghSXzAu7a3zcQ= Received: by 10.78.201.2 with SMTP id y2mr4378822huf; Fri, 27 Oct 2006 12:06:53 -0700 (PDT) Received: by 10.78.144.3 with HTTP; Fri, 27 Oct 2006 12:06:53 -0700 (PDT) Message-ID: Date: Fri, 27 Oct 2006 15:06:53 -0400 From: "Matt Arnold" To: llg-board@lojban.org Subject: [llg-board] Motion to officially recognize new art MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline X-Spam-Score: -2.3 (--) X-archive-position: 191 X-ecartis-version: Ecartis v1.0.0 Sender: llg-board-bounce@lojban.org Errors-to: llg-board-bounce@lojban.org X-original-sender: matt.mattarn@gmail.com Precedence: bulk Reply-to: llg-board@lojban.org X-list: llg-board LLG Board, In this email, I am making a motion to the board. For those who don't know much about me, I used to work in graphic design before moving into print production management for an ad agency. I wish the LLG to segment out certain purposes toward which my Lojban visual identity element could be given official sanction. For those who don't know it, a sample is here: http://www.nemorathwald.com/lojban/lojban_masthead.gif I have a guilty confession. Although I see the point about a flag needing to be recognizable by ships at sea (and our official symbol accomplishes that in the unlikely event that Lojban ever has ships at sea), from the standpoint of print and the web our official logo leaves me bleh. My guilty confession is that as Lojban's de-facto resident designer, marketer, publicist, and the only artist we have, I have not been using the logo if I can avoid it. I feel bad about this because I don't want to overturn an official decision by simply ignoring it. So I'm approaching you. I understand that the Cartesian coordinate system imposed on a Venn diagram is fully official. I don't want to completely overturn the decision we've inherited. Although in principle I wouldn't mind if we did overturn it, in my view there is no good reason to antagonize someone who felt he had a hand in choosing it. I move that we name the Cartesian coordinates on a Venn diagram "the Lojban flag" or "the Lojban heraldry", and name the Arecibo-style man embracing squares for sumti places "the Lojban logo" or merely "a logo of Lojban". The reason is that heraldry and publications are goals with strikingly differing production processes, viewing conditions, and visual design criteria. The new art consists of shapes rather than lines. A good logo has to partition off positive space from negative space. The border contour (the perimeter that isolates the figure from its surroundings) of the old art is mostly empty of pigment, and the new art is more full. This has consequences in a variety of media. Example 1: Thin lines are easy to mis-register when two printing plates don't quite line up correctly. I know this from years of professional graphic design and my current career producing print materials for an advertising agency. Example 2: I shrank the two images to 16 pixels square, to make a tiny icon called a favicon. On certain web browsers, favicons appear next to a webpage title on the title bar, on web page tabs in tabbed browsing, or in RSS feeds. When a program like Photoshop or The Gimp shrinks art, it applies anti-aliasing to smooth the edges, especially round ones. Lines are mostly edge, and circles receive a great deal of anti-aliasing, so when the original logo shrunk, anti-aliasing blurred them and they became faint. The new art had very little change, and it was trivial to clean it up one pixel at a time. Example 3: I want to carve a Lojban pumpkin for Halloween, which would be trivially easy to do with the new art, and I don't think I'm prepared to attempt it with the old art. Example 4: The old logo as a vinyl decal on a window, or a transparent GIF, would almost vanish against the moving background of complex detail, while the new art would remain legible. It's acceptable and desirable to update any group's visual identity art elements for new times and new standards of taste. (Not so with flags and heraldry, which are intended to remain the same.) The new art is popular among the community of Lojban enthusiasts. Many of them think it is the official symbol until I instruct them otherwise. I know a woman in my local Lojban group who has decided to take it upon herself to make a Lojban banner out of cloth, using the new art. Another Lojbanist created a version overlaid with Chinese text. I receive requests for the source files all the time, such as the one I received today from a German who is giving a presentation about Lojban. The image has taken on a life of its own. - The art evokes the Arecibo message to the stars, a famous attempt at communication across culture gaps which is culturally neutral, globally anthropomorphic in its content, philosophical, scientific, and mathematically universal. - The pixelated computer-screen look evokes the fact that algorithms had a hand in generating Lojban, it is spoken almost exclusively on the internet, is spoken by a large proportion of computer enthusiasts, and involves computers in some of the language goals. - The inclusion of a human figure is perhaps the most important factor, since Lojban is human-speakable and although cybernetic abstractions are central to the language, it is designed to speak about anthropomorphic concerns. These things are suggested at a glance by the new art, to someone who never heard of Lojban before. It also serves as something to point at when summarizing the sumti/selbri structure of a bridi in a couple of sentences to a complete beginner. I welcome any alteration you would suggest to this motion. -Eppcott