Thanks for your contribution planetmaker, you raise an excellent point. The only positive thing about it is simultaneously the biggest negative thing about it.planetmaker wrote:I fully agree with your assessment of the current logo. It's unimaginative, non-descriptive and mis-leading. The about only positive about it is its age; people got used to it.
This is a more general reply, not specifically to planetmaker because others have the same considerations. My explanation is this:planetmaker wrote:The idea to use the Ts in OpenTTD as buffers is great, but I'm not entirely conviced of the result yet - and I'm sad this is not constructive criticism but a rather unimaginative 'feeling'.
It does not have to be and in fact even shouldn't be obvious to the point of everyone (100%) "getting it". Symbolism with that high of a degree of obviousness can come off as naive or... dumb. In the corporate world people pay good money to serious designers because of that very thing. They can hold back. A high school kid can make the gfx alone of they have the skills and the talent.
My point, it doesn't have to be obvious.
Try this - imagine it on the side of a train.
The side of a cargo container.
An integral part of livery
Ships have it spray painted on the side
It's enough if it's unique and recognizable, we can only truly make it our own through adopting it and using it. The batch of 32bpp gfx I hope I'll have time to start working on will be containers in stations which will have this logo on the side. It's universal and ubiquitous within OTTD.
It will say OTTD when you take a screenshot and post it somewhere. In 32bpp they can be zoomed in and over time they will start to look impressive and beautiful.
I hope I'm helping in alleviating those types of worries. It really doesn't have to be obvious.
When we manage to get into the content of what we want and why then we can assess how much recognition we want or do we want it at all.
Identity graphics do not serve to convey only content, depends on what it is but it's more about conveying feelings or concepts which can be very vague or abstract and mean different things to different people.
As planetmaker pointed out, a part of appeal of TTD/OTTD is it can be played in many different ways. Ubiquity.
The first and most important measure should be - does it look professional enough to reflect the kind of work, dedication, effort that goes into all sorts of aspects of it?
Then the rest is emotional, personal, relevant as well but in this case, with a community this size, I would say less so because there will never be a consensus anyway, the core developer team will at some point have to just decide and push something through and place the exact amount of worth on the opinions of trolls that they truly have = zero.
I am looking for your feelings of fun - how do you all play ottd personally, what is the part of it that gives you that FUN feeling? I'd like to assemble a list of that and see how different it is from my personal experience and what the general average is. Iterations follow
Ok next is:
That's a legitimate point kamnet. However the half train half truck is far enough, you don't have to worry. Part of retaining distance can be excluding ships and planes. On purpose. And even if it was similar, this is all handmade and nobody can claim any copyright dispute, all they need to see is we specifically made attempts to find our own way.kamnet wrote:Which is, sadly, why I'd not want to use it. To be honest we've not had any negative dealings with Mr. Sawyer, and I'd certainly like to keep it that way. Even though OpenTTD isn't really anything like Transport Tycoon (nee Locomotion), and day-by-day the two are growing further apart, I'd like to make sure we retain some distance
There are problems in the corporate world with having abstract logos, they run the risk of not being distinct enough, at the same time, you want to simplify it visually to improve its recognition yet retain individuality. My first pick, the "O||D" is just that. Enough to be recognizable yet simple enough, also very far from TTD.
See, I don't view OTTD as "just a game" which is what TTD was - a commercial product intended to create revenue and ultimately profit. OTTD in its very essence is a completely different beast.
Seems we're on the same page, we want distinction.
The illustrative ideas I made are distinct enough for any copyright issues, I just want to put your mind at ease there, however it does make it look more like "just a game", not an open source project.
next
I touched on the level of obvious above. Yes, the symbol is not the logo, it's only a part of it. Logo can stand on its own but logo means both the symbol and type. And that's okay.kalen wrote:I feel like you really can't have the "O-||-D" logo without the accompanying "OpenTTD" label (like in the last image), because otherwise nobody will know what the logo means unless they've read this thread, which isn't very likely, if we're being real here.
Regarding your other considerations the 32bpp stuff that exists now, the base set is low quality, artistically speaking yet it's damn impressive it even exists. This is not a criticism of the author, I imagine whatever the talent, experience and skills of an author are, they probably had a very real choice to make either do 1 thing properly or try to get 100 done asap. It's a very important step though, it now exists and it is something people can get inspired by to contribute, create, improve, etc. That's kind of why I'm here now in this capacity.
I wish I had more time on my hands right now to be able to do some 32bpp stuff and incoporate this in a nice way into containers, trains, trucks so you can see what the fun of having our own (however abstract) identity is
In due time.So thank you all again for your input, next post, some fun stuff.
Much better than the buffer design, which to me feels kinda over-thought or forced.
