gamma-sky.net and gamma-cat logos

[cdeil]

@vorugantia - I wanted to ask you if you'd be interested in making a logo and banner for gamma-sky.net, and maybe also for gamma-cat?

If you don't have time or aren't interested, I can do this in the coming days.

My idea would be that we do something similar like I did for Gammapy:

Overall it's quite a bit of work to do it will, i.e. to have PDF and PNG versions (and possibly also SVG), and to have a logo and a banner. See:
https://github.com/gammapy/gammapy-extra/tree/master/logo

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For gamma-sky.net, my suggestion would be that as logo we do some sphere (e.g. grid lines or stylised in some other ways). It must be very simple so that it works as a logo. Examples (probably can't be taken for copyright reasons, must be re-drawn):
https://www.google.com/search?q=sphere+symbol&espv=2&biw=1440&bih=748&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiGqZLLtNvRAhVsAcAKHaA8BuMQ_AUIBigB

Then for the banner, we would put "gamma-sky.net" in large font, and "Portal to the gamma-ray sky" or "A portal to the gamma-ray sky", which we already discussed and chose as our slogan or tagline.

For gamma-cat, I'm not sure what symbol to put. The tagline is "An open data collection and source catalog for gamma-ray astronomy" at the moment, which is a bit long to fit. Maybe change to "Open gamma-ray data archive" or "The open gamma-ray data archive"?

Colors could all be matching the grey and red from Gammapy, so that the three together form a brand:

• gammapy: analysis
• gamma-cat: data archive
• gamma-sky.net: portal

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Maybe I should buy "gamma-cat.net" or "gamma-cat.org" now, so that we have a permanent and nice and simple URL for the coming years?

@adonath @joleroi - Thoughts?

[vorugantia]

I can help with the logo. Only thing is we would want it to look similar in style to Gammapy's logo, which it seems you made on Omnigraffle. The tool works on Mac but not Windows, so I would have to pick another graphics tool. Perhaps you should put together the logo in the same tools you already have, but I can supply the sphere graphic. Then you can put the gamma letter (the same one you used for Gammapy) inside the sphere or around it somewhere, as well as the slogan. I'll think of some ideas for gamma-cat. Does that work for you?

[cdeil]

I used Omnigraffle at the time, but I never liked it much, and now would use a free tool like https://inkscape.org or https://vectr.com

The ideal solution would be to have a Python / matplotlib script to create the files, so that it's reproducible if we ever have to or want other formats or change something. Re-doing the manual steps and trying to get e.g. the border or the images right is painful. Doing it this way means an extra ~ day of work though, see for example:
https://github.com/scikit-image/skimage-branding/blob/master/logo/scikit_image_logo.py

@adonath started to write a script for nice animated GIF logos of Gammapy with Poisson noise at one point, for logos we wanted to put on the webpage. @adonath - Is the script and GIF file available somewhere?

One more thought I had was that we could keep the "gamma" greek letter in all three logos the same, and just have the second part on the right variable:

• letter "pi" for gammapy
• some sky or sphere or star symbol for gamma-sky
• a cat or archive or database or download symbol for gamma-cat

This will probably need some web searching for free, no-attribution icons (e.g. http://fontawesome.io/icon/star/ would be attribution-free I think, but isn't super nice, and they don't have a cat), or @vorugantia, you try to draw something with a vector graphic program.

[cdeil]

I just now saw that scikit-image took their snake image from https://pixabay.com/
They seem to have almost a millon images and vector graphics in high quality, completely free even for commercial use, not requiring attribution.

So I think we should search around there first, instead of trying to draw something ourselves.

Look, they even have cats:
https://pixabay.com/en/photos/?image_type=vector&cat=&min_width=&min_height=&q=cat&order=popular
https://pixabay.com/en/cat-animal-the-silhouette-outside-1583462/
https://pixabay.com/en/animal-cat-leopard-snow-leopard-162020/

[cdeil]

I'd like to finally make the logos and banners for gamma-sky.net and gamma-cat now.

I've played a bit with this, and so far my favourite would be to use the sphere from https://pixabay.com/en/logo-logotype-sphere-summer-sun-2150297/ which gives this:

It's just a quick draft, text placement and colors can be improved a bit. It doesn't work very well on black background, one would have to change the colors (which I don't want to spend time on).

Some other spheres I found on pixabay also look OK (and would work better on dark background if put in white), but when put in the banner I didn't find quite as nice:

@vorugantia - Thoughts? OK to go with one of these sphere logos or keep searching?

[vorugantia]

@cdeil - I am a big fan of this logo, I really like it! The sphere you chose is my favorite mainly because of the color. I guess we could just use the same gradient on the other spheres but the shape of the one you chose looks nice as well. I would work with this design.

Also, I know I was supposed to try making the logo first - I'm sorry about that. if there is anything you would like me to edit I can do so now.

[adonath]

Thanks @cdeil! I also like the logo very much!

Out of curiosity (corporate design and bla..): could you make one version of the logo that is even more similar to the Gammapy one? E.g. choose the same colour for the gamma at the beginning and highlight the "gamma-ray" with this colour too. For the sphere and font one could use the dark grey colour as in the Gammapy logo too.

[cdeil]

@adonath - I started out with a version where the Gammapy is red, just like for Gammapy. It didn't work well with the other colors, and I'm not sure grey will work well.

My suggestion is that we finish this up together next week and make the final decision on colors.

FYI: this is my proposal for gamma-cat, there it was easy to keep the red from Gammapy:

I also tried these variants, which I don't like quite as much:

Again - comments welcome, and I'd suggest that we do the final decision together face-to-face next week (on Friday, before I'm busy).

I know the cat silhouette is borderline kitsch and also too much detail for a logo. But it's the best I could come up with with 1 hour of playing around with this and I don't have another good idea / didn't find a better cat. So if someone has another proposal - please post it here (Github comments allow copy & paste for PNGs)