🕸Fergus Duniho wrote on Fri, Sep 1, 2017 04:30 PM UTC:
Google has a good logo, and I like the minimalist approach. However, the current logo is very busy rather than minimalist. It includes a chess board area, pieces in three different colors, and the name of the site spelled out on four lines. Google has the advantage of having to style only a single word, allowing them to make that one word stark and prominent. This site's title has four words. It could possibly be reduced to two words, Chess Variants. I would like the logo to visually suggest the idea of Chess variants, but lining up the letters of these two words on a checkered area does not work very well, because they have different lengths. Getting rid of the checkered area lets me align these two words with each other, using proportional fonts to make them the same width. Without using a chess board area, the main way left to visually convey the idea of Chess variants is to use pieces or some kind of Chess or Chess variant related art. Although the pieces can be easily seen in the large version of the current logo, they cannot be easily seen in the small version of the logo that appears at the top of almost every page, and many might not even be recognizable as pieces for a game like Chess. Several are animals, a couple are artillery, and one is just a circle. Larger, more recognizable pieces could work better in a small version of the logo, and this would entail using fewer of them. Another option is artwork. In my recent draft, I used a Tenniel image of Alice picking up an anthropomorphized Chess King. This is a piece commonly used in Chess and its variants, and its anthropomophized nature suggests something different than just another site on Chess. It also echoes the influence of Carroll's works on several Chess variants by V. R. Parton.
Google has a good logo, and I like the minimalist approach. However, the current logo is very busy rather than minimalist. It includes a chess board area, pieces in three different colors, and the name of the site spelled out on four lines. Google has the advantage of having to style only a single word, allowing them to make that one word stark and prominent. This site's title has four words. It could possibly be reduced to two words, Chess Variants. I would like the logo to visually suggest the idea of Chess variants, but lining up the letters of these two words on a checkered area does not work very well, because they have different lengths. Getting rid of the checkered area lets me align these two words with each other, using proportional fonts to make them the same width. Without using a chess board area, the main way left to visually convey the idea of Chess variants is to use pieces or some kind of Chess or Chess variant related art. Although the pieces can be easily seen in the large version of the current logo, they cannot be easily seen in the small version of the logo that appears at the top of almost every page, and many might not even be recognizable as pieces for a game like Chess. Several are animals, a couple are artillery, and one is just a circle. Larger, more recognizable pieces could work better in a small version of the logo, and this would entail using fewer of them. Another option is artwork. In my recent draft, I used a Tenniel image of Alice picking up an anthropomorphized Chess King. This is a piece commonly used in Chess and its variants, and its anthropomophized nature suggests something different than just another site on Chess. It also echoes the influence of Carroll's works on several Chess variants by V. R. Parton.