Logo Contest and Other Updates

by
in pipedot on (#3H7)
story imageEarly last month, I tried my hand at creating a unique logo for this site. Turns out, I sucked at it. My temporary solution was to type "Pipedot" in the Koloss font at 25 point and go back to work on the more important stuff. Of course, some have pointed out the resemblance of this setup to the green site. And I'd have to agree; more differentiation is warranted.

Therefore, I've created a new Logo Contest at designcontest.com - a site that specializes at such things. The winner not only gets their beautiful creation plastered at the top of this page, but also gets a cool $300 USD prize. The contest ends Sunday (1 week duration.)

Please feel free to browse the entries and help me pick out the good ones. The initial response is almost overwhelming, with a hundred submissions on the first day.

Other updates for this week include:
  • More Icons - These are the cute little icons tacked onto the top of articles. Much effort was exerted to keep this set as free-software friendly as possible while maintaining a consistent look and feel. The count is now 145 and will continue to climb over the next few months.
  • Unicode Support - Most languages and useful symbols (like math, currency, and punctuation) are now allowed. Dingbats, smiley faces, non-printing characters, right-to-left switchers, and other gibberish are still filtered. This change should resolve the issue some have experienced with fancy quotes, em dashes, resolved HTML entities, and foreign languages.
Reply 16 comments

Testing 一 二 三 (Score: 1)

by bryan@pipedot.org on 2014-03-31 17:28 (#WK)

こにちわ
Привет
γειά σου
¿alo?
Fancy quotes: "hello world"
Em dashes: foo - bar
Math: sin²(θ) + cos²(θ) = 1

Re: Testing 一 二 三 (Score: 1)

by bryan@pipedot.org on 2014-03-31 17:34 (#WM)

Αυτά μου φαίνονται αλαμπουρνέζικα.

Animated (Score: 1)

by hyper@pipedot.org on 2014-03-31 21:27 (#WN)

A picture of the /. Logo having the stuffing beaten out of it with phb money and users flying out. The fwd slash flops over, picks itself upright and fades to |. blue. The |. description "without the corporate slant" ffades in under.

100 on the first day (Score: 2, Funny)

by Anonymous Coward on 2014-03-31 21:35 (#WP)

This place must have a lot of lurkers

Re: 100 on the first day (Score: 2, Interesting)

by rocks@pipedot.org on 2014-04-01 01:10 (#WW)

I wonder what the member to lurker ratio is on sites like slashdot, soylent and now pipedot?

Re: 100 on the first day (Score: 4, Informative)

by stove@pipedot.org on 2014-04-01 03:19 (#WZ)

Very High. Here's the most recent stats I could find from soylentnews.

It looks like the raw daily page views are in the 6-figure range, while daily comments are in the 3-figure range. That's (very) roughly around 10000 page views per comment.

I'd love to compare between sites. My guess is pipedot would be about the same or slightly higher, while slashdot would be orders of magnitude worse.

Re: 100 on the first day (Score: 1)

by tempest@pipedot.org on 2014-04-01 14:18 (#XE)

I lurk on slashdot unintentionally. After so many years of reading the comments, the same arguments would pop up all the time and I could pretty much predict the circle jerk. It's at the point where I don't feel it's worth the effort to contribute.

Nice logos (Score: 3, Informative)

by zafiro17@pipedot.org on 2014-04-01 11:32 (#X4)

Holy crap, some of those proposed logos are damned good looking! I didn't take the time to try to figure out if some guidelines were proposed, but they seem to all fall into a certain color scheme, and they are mostly variations of a certain play on the shape of the letters P and D. I thought there would be some entries using the pipe and dot characters; maybe before the end there will be.

Meanwhile, I'm impressed!

I doubt these are created by |. lurkers though. There's probably a community of hungry graphic designers hanging around that site waiting for contests. They don't have a connection to the site, they just know how to do art and when somebody needs something, they jump in to compete.

This is all brute supposition, of course.

Nice look today (Score: 1)

by coolhand@pipedot.org on 2014-04-01 11:43 (#X5)

I have to admit I got a real LOL when I refreshed my Pipedot page today.. Talk about a great colorscheme! (and the "Beta" joke... hahaha)

Can we keep it past April Fool's??? :)

Re: Nice look today (Score: 0)

by Anonymous Coward on 2014-04-01 12:25 (#XA)

I found it depressing. The green site doesn't have April fools anymore :-(
Long live the ponies!

Innacurate Icons (Score: 1)

by dotdotdot@pipedot.org on 2014-04-01 18:42 (#XM)

The gun icon has a couple of problems. It has a single action trigger but has no hammer, and the ejection port is on the wrong (left) side.

Re: Innacurate Icons (Score: 1)

by bryan@pipedot.org on 2014-04-02 00:09 (#XT)

I went through no less than 5 different gun icons. They all looked like crap IMO but I was spending too much time on it and I really just wanted something better than a chemistry beaker for the recent "gunshot victim" article. This icon in particular will probably get replaced.

Re: Innacurate Icons (Score: 1)

by zafiro17@pipedot.org on 2014-04-02 11:54 (#Y5)

I for one am pleased to be in the company of Pipeheads that know their firearms :)