Distinctive application logo for Back In Time

[buhtz]

Introduction

Back In Time needs is own logo. Beside technical details also license and copyright issues need to be taken into account. This is a follow up of #215 where some work and discussion was done to come up with a new logo.

Recommendations

Creation & technical details

• There are no restrictions on the creative part. We have some ideas and sketch up's (see below). But we are open and free for fresh ideas.
• Beside the resulting images (ico, png, ...) the project also need access to the original raw source file (e.g. SVG).
• First focus on one big application logo.
• Beside the "big one logo" systray icons need to be considered. This means...
  • Light/dark versions
  • The smallest resolution that should be supported is 22x22.
• There is a helper application AppIconPreview to preview different versions and themes of the same icon.
• Consider Gnome Icon Guidelines https://developer.gnome.org/hig/guidelines/app-icons.html .
• Also consider this comment Use distinctive application icon/logo for Back In Time (icon proposals) #215 (comment) .
• If possible a "banner" (1500x500px) would be nice to add it to our Mastodon account.
• Licensing & Copyright need to be considered. See next section.

License & Copyright

If you are familiar and experienced with licensing of creative work please feel free to suggest and choose your options. If not we can assist and would suggest the following points.

• Copyright is kept by the author (you) of the logo and always cited that way.
• License need to be chosen for the raw source file (e.g. SVG) and the resulting images (png, ico, ...).
• We suggest using "GPL-2.0-or-later" for your work because it fits the project license.
• We don't have a trademark and also don't have the resources nor money to invest in registering a trademark.
• Because of not having a trademark, there is no way of preventing the situation that the logo might be re-used by other projects, products or companies, in a context different from Back In Time. This is theoretically and we are not really concerned about such a situation.

Sketch Up's

In the following you will find three sketch up's. These are just suggestions or ideas. The final logo don't need to contain any of the aspects shown in these sketch up's.

Previous ideas

Please see #215 for some inspiration.

Simple discs

• A stack of 3 discs indicates storage space.
• And an arrow (see description below).
  

Discs with hardlinks

• Again a 3-stack-storage indicating 3 snapshots.
• A vertical component (columns) added to it indicating hard links.
• First column (on the left) is cut into 3 pieces because the file it symbolize was modified between each of the 3 backups.
• Middle column has a hardlink between the first and second backup because the file was not modified.
• Third column (on the right) without any horizontal cuts as one block because the file was never modified.
  

"BIT" Abbreviation

• The arrow again.
• The letters B-I-T in the middle.
• Johannes mentioned that this logo could be associated with bitcoin. Might not be a good choice because of that.

Round arrow

In all three previous examples there is an arrow around the logo.

• For me this indicates the movement in time.
• The direction might be against the clock because of the "back" in "Back In Time".
• The arrow is thin in the beginning and becomes thicker to indicate some dynamic that is going on.
• If the arrow is to "loud" it might not go all the 360° but less.

[hannes101]

I just wanted to add that the design prototype "BIT" Abbreviation looks quite a bit like the bitcoin logo. At least that was one of the first associations I had, when looking at it.

[buhtz]

Boring.... My first steps with Inkscape.

Here is the original Inkscape SVG if someone wants to jump in and work further with it. 😆

[hannes101]

Not judging your efforts ;-) But something I already thought about before, perhaps we could ask this project for help.
From what I understand they are exactly looking for open source projects, which need design expertise.

https://opensourcedesign.net/