Ideas For Dozens: August 2007 Archives

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August 20, 2007

Designing A Logo for The Ape

So, out of the blue, I spent a few hours collaborating last Friday with a major open source thought leader to design a logo (above) for one of his projects. Here's the story…

Early last week, Sun senior Web guru, co-chair of the Atom Publishing Group, and recent RailsConf keynoter, Tim Bray, wrote a blog post welcoming a new committer to an ongoing project of his called The Ape. The Ape is the Atom Protocol Exerciser, an almost-but-not-quite validator for Atom implementations. Basically, as Tim says in his full description of The Ape, since Atom is a fully fledged publishing protocol and not just a feed format, the output of evaluating the performance of implementations must be more sophisticated than a simple thumbs up or thumbs down and hence The Ape was born.

Having done some work parsing and generating Atom feeds, but not having heard of The Ape before I was intrigued and so clicked through immediately. On The Ape's page, I found a form for submitting the URI of your Atom implementation (along with any necessary authentication info) and a box on the side that said:

It would be nice if there were a cute picture of an ape here, ideally grooming another ape for fleas and parasites. Got one?

I immediately thought: 'hey, I could make something like that.' So, I spent an hour at the end of the day last Friday in Illustrator and ginned up a simple little line drawing of two apes grooming each other. I combined it with a simple little text treatment of 'APE' (in an all caps version of my favorite, News Std Gothic Bold) and sent it off to Tim.

To my surprise, Tim wrote back almost immediately with enthusiasm and some suggestions for improvements. My first draft was in stark black and white and the text treatment was somewhat brutal. He wanted color (something "surprising") and the whole thing to feel friendlier. After batting a few quick iterations back and forth, we settled on the logo you see above and, now, on The Ape's homepage.

Tim made a great design client (a rare and precious thing); he had a specific image in mind but wasn't too picky, he gave good clear feedback without being harsh or overly critical, and he settled on a final version without calling for endless fidgety revisions. The final result came out much more Hanna-Barbera than I was originally picturing and, I think, much better.

It feels good to have contributed something to an open source project even if it wasn't code. The Atom Publishing Protocol design effort was a noble one (Tim spoke about the original motivations and social machinations behind it very eloquently in Atom as a Case Study at last year's ETech) and I'm proud to have contributed my little piece, however peripheral.

As Steve Yegge pointed out at this year's OSCON, Open Source Software tends to suffer from a tin ear when it comes to marketing and the aesthetics of self-presentation. I've tried to give my own nascent OSS projects a bit of flair by spending some time on a nice logo for my Thumbnail rubygem and video demos for RAD. So, if you're an open source project leader, don't forget to reach out to designers to make your projects more than merely presentable, or, if you're a designer, don't be shy about offering your expertise to the OSS projects you come across that need a little visual love.

Tagged: ape, atom, tim bray, open source, logo, design

Posted by Greg at 10:32 PM | Comments (0)

August 8, 2007

My PDX Pop Now! 2007 Liveblog

This past weekend was the fourth annual PDX Pop Now! free all-ages festival of Portland music. I've been on the board of PDX Pop since it's inception and I feel pretty confident saying that this was the most successful year we've ever had. We moved the fest to a new venue, Audio Cinema, directly under the Hawthorne Bridge on the eastside. We had an outdoor stage for the first time (which had been a collective dream of ours since the beginning) and by far the most attendance we've seen.

Just like last year, I blogged the whole thing live on Urban Honking: Blogging the Sh*t out of PDX Pop Now! 2007. Here are my posts from a few of my favorite sets:

Tagged: pdxpopnow, portland, oregon, music, festival

Posted by Greg at 11:35 AM | Comments (0)

August 2, 2007

RAD demo videos online

During my recent presentation of RAD at FOSCON, I did two demos: I wrote a 'hello world' light-blinking sketch live and I showed and explained a sketch for communicating with the Arduino over serial communication in order to wave a flag. During the demos, I had setup my screen so the audience could see my code samples, my command line, and a webcam pointed at the Arduino and its peripherals.

While these demos don't translate that well into normal slides, they were the heart of my presentation. After a little bit of searching, I came across Snapz Pro, a great little Mac utility for making screencasts. With Snapz Pro and only a couple of dozen rehearsals, I was able to create two short videos that pretty much reproduce the content of my demos. And I've put them online so you can take a look even if you weren't lucky enough to be at Holocene last week:

RAD Demo #1: Ruby Arduino Development Hello World