What should our logo be?

Question

Another one of the 7 essential meta questions- what should our logo look like?

Edit: This was originally a discussion both about the logo and about the theme, but now the theme has a separate discussion.

Answer 1

How about a DFA with 2 states, one labeled "confusion" (or something like that) and the other being a final state labeled "clarity" or "solution" (or something to that effect), and the DFA has only one transition, from confusion to solution, and on the transition arc we write "cstheory.org" in a large font.

Answer 2

How do you like this one: http://students.mimuw.edu.pl/~ksoltys/tcs.gif ? When you draw this little line between sigma and the infinity symbol, you get a wind-up sigma ;) which I think is a nice symbol for TCS. I used this logo for TCS students' club in my department, but I think it wouldn't conflict.

edit: I made some changes: sigma is now grey and it has two gears instead of the infinity symbol. I didn't change the sigma's font: sans serif fonts deprive it of it's serious mathematical feel, and all serif ones I tried force it to be large (otherwise serifs overlap with the "t"). If someone knows some better font for the sigma, let me know, I will change it. You may also tweak the (GIMP) source: http://students.mimuw.edu.pl/~ksoltys/tcs2.xcf

Answer 3

Why not a Turing Machine? Something like

http://tiny.cc/4az4q

with the site name written on the tape and something depicting a group of people or a man on his computer inside the head of the TM

Answer 4

Some suggestions for logos:

• Alvy Ray Smith's "Synapse", which has appeared on the front cover of every FOCS proceedings since 1973.
• Jorge Stolfi's "Self-Adjusting Search Tree"
• Tom Dunne's "Turing Machine"
• This panel from "Lovelace: The Origin" by Sydney Padua
• Theta and Omega from Prof. E. McSquared's Original and Highly Edifying Calculus Primer by Howard Swann and John Johnson
• Something commissioned from Randall Munroe

Of course, we'd have to ask the artist's permission to use any of these.

Answer 5

Proposal 1 (following Jukka's comment)

Proposal 2 (following Kaveh's comment)

Proposal 3 (following Robin's comment)

Proposal 4 (following arnab's comment)

This last one is more sketchy. It now has some visual defects, but they can be easily removed.

Answer 6

Another simpler (a little bit funny:) version of $? \rightarrow !$.

Answer 7

There is no "natural" depiction and design of theoretical computer science and of course it is a matter of taste. But looking at the popular branches of the field, automata theory could provide some simple and easy to recognize images: the name, decorated with circled states, connected via labeled transitions etc.

Answer 8

For the site icon (favicon.ico) the design has to be as simple as possible. We currently have "T/C" which doesn't mean anything. Of the above proposals "TCS" and "?→!" are the two that would seem to work for this specific design element.

Answer 9

I would recommend (in terms of colors and fonts) something similar to StackOverflow or MathOverflow.

Answer 10

What about this?

It's from the book Decision Procedures - An Algorithmic Point of View, so it's certainly copyrighted.

Answer 11

For the logo, should the text read CSTheory to match the domain name, or should it be spelled out as Computer Science Theory (or even Theoretical Computer Science)? Even though it would be less informative, I think I would lean toward CSTheory, as it is visually simpler. As for a graphic, I think Jakob's or chazisop's ideas would be nice. The logo text could actually appear as symbols on the TM tape. One consideration is that space is kind of tight in the logo, so it could be hard to do something too elaborate without it looking cluttered.

I find the color scheme on MathOverflow to be hard on my eyes; something a bit more subdued would be nice. Maybe someone has a colleague who works in human factors or graphic design and can help with the color choices?

As far as the other design elements go, the other main items are the backgrounds for the various buttons and tabs. I really like the fact that background image for the tag text on the beta site is an actual tag. It makes it immediately obvious what those are, and I think that's what good design ought to do. I think it's unfortunate that the other sites decided to discard that visual metaphor; I hope we keep it in some form.

Answer 12

For logo, I suggest an illustration (or an idea for one) from Lewis Carrol's books about Alice.

Edit

Here is an idea: The disappearing Cheshire Cat, i.e. his eyes and teeth. ? and ! in the eyes, "cstheory" on his teeth, his leaps will look like the arrow in $? \rightarrow !$.

Answer 13

Here's a variation on the emerging consensus, with a little more razzmatazz. I'm also including the source tikz, so in particular someone can figure out how to raise the text a little higher. For some reason I was unable to convert the PDF to an image with enough resolution to display it inline

\usetikzlibrary{decorations.text}
\usetikzlibrary{arrows,automata,shadows}

\begin{tikzpicture}[scale=2.0,node distance=3cm]
  \tikzstyle{every state}=[shade=ball,ball color=white,draw=none,text=black,
                           circular drop shadow] % to get the shadow effect

  \filldraw [fill=gray!20!white] (-0.5,-0.5) rectangle (2,0.8);
  \node[state, ball color=black,text=white]      (s)   {$?$};
  \node[state]         (t) [right of=s] {$!$};

  \draw [->] (s) to [out=60,in=120] (t);
  \draw [decorate,decoration={text along path, text={\ \ \ \ \ \ \ cstheory}}] 
        [yshift=1in] (s) to [out=70,in=110] (t);
  \path (s) edge [loop above]  ();
\end{tikzpicture}

Note: version updated in response to comments (no loop, and cstheory raised slightly)