RULE LOGO CONTEST

(Note from Marco, oct 2010: it is possible that I mixed up or confused some of the images below. Please tell me if this is the case).

The contest to choose and create the official RULE has been held, and the winner is the “Penguin on a speeding turtle” concept. Now we only need to actually produce a drawing… If you can draw, please scan your proposal and send it to rule, att. rule-project, dot, org. If you can’t draw, but have a friend/relative coworker who can, ask him or her to do it and send it anyway. Thank you in advance!

(200302) Penguin on a speeding turtle by Haef

(20030223) Haef submitted a new image too: penguin and turtle on a plane.

Moreover, M. Moeller submitted the RULE word itself, in this REALLY NICE font (I (Marco) am a big Tolkien fan, so I immediately loved the style of the R letter). What do you think? Could it be merged/superimposed on the actual “penguin+turtle” drawings?

Here is how to write RULE, by haef (20030128).

Another “Penguin + speeding turtle submission” by Haef. This is pushing the turtle rather than making it fly, but it’s nice, isn’t it? And we can probably ask to the author to modify it. What do you think? Answer on the list, please!

(20021013) I received this proposal by “mlahumlaha”. We already agreed that it should show that the penguin is making the turtle run, rather than being passively carried away, and that the final version will be more smooth and polished.

Apart from that, what do you think? Any comment (on the list) is welcome, and other submissions as well: it is time to give RULE a logo! Marco

Guidelines

The logo should not rely, if possible, on jokes/associations valid only in one language, or meaningful only to hackers (of course we can exclude the penguin from the hacker-only concepts)
Confusion with script kiddies (see the “rulez” thread in the mailing list archives) should be avoided too.
Hint if possible, to all faces of RULE: help schools, remove bloat, nice hack, not necessarily in this order
Be readable even in black and white, be useable as an icon too, or at least have an icon version.
Avoid anything Red Hat specific, both to not piss their lawyers off with pointless copyright issues, and to stress the fact that much of RULE is not distro specific (not even Linux specific, for that matter…)

Concepts presented in the context

Penguin on a speeding turtle (Martin Stricker??)

Tux sitting on a turtle who’s legs are spinning so fast they are a blur. (Comment by Marco: what about dressing and drawing the penguin like Snoopy’s “WWI Flying Ace”?)

Body-builder penguin (M. Fioretti)

(April 2002) A thin, but very muscular penguin coming out from the standard tux as somebody coming out from a giant carnival costume, smiling and lending a hand. The message would be that RULE frees the lean and mean linux from the fat/bloat it accumulated over the years, without loosing any real strength in the process, and by this it’s also able to help students, and everybody else with an old PC (Actual drawing made by Paolo, the husband of the sister of my sister’s husband… if I didn’t miss any step….)

Existing bodybuilder penguins at LWN.net, signalled by Joachim, joack_at_gmx_._net:

Penguin in a laptop (Joachim, joack_at_gmx_._net)

Elaborating on the Penguin in a laptop found here.

Some combination of a penguin and the matrioshka dolls concept (Martin Stricker)

Small but colourful (by Bryon Gill). Unfortunately I (Marco) lost this screenshot… The concept is that RULE takes a big but rather plain (grayscale in fact) penguin, and makes it smaller and progressively more colorful, signifying the ways in which there are different advantages to full-size versus minimal linux distributions. I got the idea when thinking about the russian doll concept, with bigger penguins splitting in half to reveal smaller ones. Well, Russian doll penguins are beyond my ability to draw but I can do progressively smaller penguins, and I think this gets the idea across. I think it’s fairly obvious how this could be iconified, a small square image of a penguin inside a larger yellow square (basically the “E” block).

Tux with a crown, by hairylarry

HairyLarry’s proposal A skinny tux with a crown. He could be used alone or in conjunction with his fatter brother. There was also an additional graphic to help promote RULE, by hairylarry

RULE = Run Up to Date Linux Everywhere