I really don’t like these logos that are boxes with text in the lower right. The post cites a “common design language” with other tech but this has to be the most low effort language imaginable.
I once saw an interview with an apparently well-known logo designer, who said something to the effect of: "When somebody sees my work and says 'that's nothing, anybody could make that', that means they instantly got the logo, understood its structure, with no distraction. That's what it's meant to do, so to me it's a compliment."
Whether that applies here is naturally subjective, but hearing that changed how I look at logo designs a bit.
I dunno, a lot of professional design these days of extreme flatness looks like stuff I’d have done in the ‘00s while developing something just to have some kind of design and structure, then everyone would see it and be like “the program’s great but of course we’ll need to get the designers on it, ha ha, programmers and design, so bad at it, am I right?”
A lot of it would still get that reaction, I think, if a programmer presented them instead of a designer, and these look to me like they’d be among them.
Eh, having worked halfway between coding and design my whole career, I'm ambivalent. Design is just one of those things that everyone is confident they have an informed opinion about, even if they've spent a lifetime total of zero seconds thinking about what the criteria for a good design should be, let alone how to apply them. I think most every designer learns early on to ignore all the "but that's just..." comments, and rightly so IMHO.
That said:
> A lot of it would still get that reaction, I think, if a programmer presented them instead of a designer, and these look to me like they’d be among them.
Weren't the logos in TFA made and voted on by programmers?
There’s a limit to that. By that token, every logo in existence could be a white square with black text on it. Clearly they are not, because people understand the need for some differentiation. Even in this case, the logos benefit from having colour.
And they’re not even consistent. Three of them are squares, two of them are different shapes, and despite the simplicity even something as trivial as the font size and spacing isn’t uniform.
I could listen to logo designers talk all day long, you pick up some many nuggets of wisdom. I've watched pretty much everything Aaron Draplin has online that you can access for free.
Logos do not exist in a vacuum, so evaluating them requires considering their context.
CSS is not a technology that needs eye-catching marketing. The existence of branding is mostly just for the purposes of giving someone something to put on a powerpoint slide, or a sticker to put on a laptop. It's allowed to be boring.
In addition, it exists as part of a family of web technologies, so giving it consistent branding with the other web technologies makes sense. You can argue that whoever first came up with this simple sort of branding was unimaginative (I think the JS logo was the first?), but just because something is simple doesn't mean it's not capable of being iconic.
The overlapping CSS suggestions had the most thumbs up, but did not seem to make it into the candidates.
They use the words vote and community, but actually taking them seriously means accepting the Boaty McBooatface when it happens.
I liked the offset logos because they served just as well as logos and were a good humoured nod towards CSS issues that it would be worthwhile keeping in mind for a bit of humility.
Not who you are replying to, but I started learning HTML/CSS right when HTML5 and CSS3 had just come out, so I do have somewhat of a soft spot for these
Yes, I've always thought they were excellent logos. Makes me nostalgic about the optimism of this time.
Also people actually use them, a while back every CS student inexplicably had these stickers on their laptop. I can't see these new logos being ever used as stickers because they're just... nothing.
As someone coming back to frontend after ten years... the optimism was justified! Writing UI code is amazing now.
Don't let the warts of the real implementation get you down, it's a delight how everything I want to do is just part of the vanilla stack now, one way or another.
I'm not even convinced that html and css need logos. Those shield logos always made me think they were trying to sell you something, which is weird for a markup language.
What is color blind unfriendly about the new logos precisely? Which variant of color blindness will not be able to read them?
Which visual impairment exactly will find it easier to parse the previous logos (which are a mess of design scarcely related to the actual technology name) than the current ones, which contain thick bold text indicating exactly what the technology is called?
> Do not rely on color alone to denote information
> Use additional cues or information to convey content
The old icons were certainly ugly. But they had a unique shape (cue) and didn't rely on color. The new logo has text which helps, but this is where visual impairment becomes an issue (lack of focus to read said text).
I have no intent to take away from the meaningful choices made in this logo's design. But even just picking a unique shape for each component would go a long way.
The old CSS and HTML logos had identical shape aside from the text. The new CSS and HTML logos have different shape (albeit subtle), larger text, and a greater difference in lightness.
While they aren't snazzy, they do have some benefits that often go unconsidered:
Logos are sometimes printed on shirts (in monochrome, or where rich coloring costs extra), or embroidered onto hats, or read at a distance (like conference booth posters), or printed to B/W official letterhead, or scaled down for an icon pack. A 3rd party will include a logo on something with a preexisting style, and it should look okay there.
A logo which is structurally simple and uses few colors can be easily adapted to these scenarios — printed in black-and-white, or as an outline without solid colors.
I don't see the problem with low-effort. It's clear and concise, while also having more character when just an un-styled word mark. This is a technology used by people who already know what it is, I would be far more annoyed with adding more complexity.
Sure, but it's good that it's low effort. We don't need fancy branding for languages. Few people will see thrm. These aren't paid products with marketing campaigns. They are just tools of the trade.
Simplicity is fine! Minimal effort is fine! But these are poorly executed. The article says the logo follows "the design language of the logos of other web technologies," but there is no design language.
The text in in random sizes and different fonts for no reason. The shapes are not all the same or all different; they are just randomly different.
It's not that any one logo looks bad; they look awful because they are _incoherent_.
Disagree, but then again my soulless engineer's heart has close to zero tolerance for design for design's sake, so what do I know?
The most important part about convoying that an item is CSS is including the letters CSS. So while I am a little disgusted they wasted time on an icon at all, I will admit that many of our design language structures demand an icon. So I am somewhat relieved they managed to dodge the design for design's sake crowd and picked the best possible one. A non-descript box with the letters CSS in it.
You're absolutely right, especially considering the canonical CSS-in-a-box logo has long been established [1], and they should really embrace it if they had any sense of humor.
Perhaps those brutalist logos were designed specifically such that they could be rendered using CSS itself?
Though I could understand why they'd want to distance themselves from the old "shield" logo that turned out to signify shielding "browser vendors" from broad implementation of CSS renderers and to keep a niche of job security at W3C, Inc. due to rampant and unwarranted complexity, but in any case was burnt by being placed next to vulgar metalhand vectors, not to speak of being culturally discriminative when viewed in a "woke" interpretation.
