New logo and mascot

[lpil]

Hello! 💖

The Gleam project could do with a new logo and mascot as the current one isn't as legible and popular as we'd like it be.

This is an open source project of volunteers and we have little to no budget for this work, so we're treating this like all other aspects of the project and relying on the kindness and enthusiasm of the open source community.

We'd like to develop a new logo and mascot in conjunction with the community, finding something that fits right in with us and our vibe :)

The selection process

We'd like to iterate on designs here and on the Gleam discord. Once we have some potential options we'll solicit a final round feedback from the community before the Gleam core team makes the final decision, likely going with whichever is most popular with the community.

Vibes

Gleam is all about friendliness, both technologically and socially. We're proud of how supportive and enjoyable and cosy our community is, and it's important to us that all manner of folks feel welcome, especially those from under-represented groups in tech such as but not limited to trans people, and black people and women. We also want it to be clear to troublemakers and hateful people that they would not fit in and are not welcome.

The pink branding is intended to communicate these values, and we want a cute logo and mascot that also communicates this.

The current branding can be seen on the website, including Lucy the star, the current logo. https://gleam.run/

Goals

We want the mascot and logo to be clearly identifiable as whatever it is, and also distinctly as Gleam.

We want the mascot and logo to be usable at all sorts of different sizes, from a tiny website favicon, to printed on a t-shirt, to projected onto a conference wall during a presentation.

The logo and the mascot don't have to be the same thing or a variation on each other, but we certainly want to have something for each.

I think a low colour count (or low colour count version) would be desirable such that the logo and mascot can work in more places, such as other websites with different branding. We'd have vector versions of the images to ensure highest quality whatever the size, and to avoid having to have the work redrawn.
I'm not a designer though, so perhaps I'm wrong with how this works.

Animals

Here's some animals that have come up in discussion

Flamingo

Pink and fabulous

Inca Tern

Has a fancy moustache

Seahorses

Fits alongside Erlang's unofficial squid mascot. Erlang being the parent language of Gleam.

Small bioluminescent sea creatures are quite Gleamy.

Jellyfish

Similar to seahorses! Bioluminescent!

Starfish

A continuation of the current logo.

Prior art

Original branding thread: #84

Here's some existing logos and mascots that I like

Alpaca language

Go language

One thing that is really cool about Go is how the mascot can be adopted by Go projects

Pikelet language

Hy language

Rust language

Not much of a link between their logo and their mascot, and that's OK!

Ash framework (Theo's mascot)

Witchcraft framework

Fly platform and their blog artwork

[tynanbe]

As Louis mentioned, apart from the gleamingo (possibly a flamingo wearing shades), I was mostly interested in small, biolominescent sea creatures (hopefully precluding the horrifying sort).

Sea stars and sea horses both have some fitting representatives.

One difficulty is the word Gleam doesn't easily lend itself to a square/round shape (e.g. avatars, favicons), but it might work to get creative with letter arrangements, such as pairing Gl, ea, and m, with the "ea" stacked above the "m." I don't see a problem with using just the mascot or iconographic part of a logo for those cases though (like Witchcraft does).

Here's a very rough sketch for the concept of "sea star as A."

A shorter version

Here are some inspirational images.

[treejadey]

gotta love the jellyfish concept,
they're brainless (the language is simple)
they can be glowey and shiny (gleamy as one might say)
and they're also pink.

im sure someone could come up with some kind of a cute way to do a jellyfish

[Theosaurus-Rex]

Hey there! Bear with me as I'm on mobile, Australian internet is terrible.

Here's a few sketches as were riffed on over in the discord, the seahorses seem to be a fan favourite so far

[MystPi]

I'm a huge fan of the second image's seahorses—so cute! I could easily see those becoming Gleam's mascot.

[DanielSherlock]

It's not the cute direction the new logo/mascot is going in, but I had fun breaking out the felt-tips and colouring pencils to see how my what-if-Lucy-was-a-flamingo idea I had a couple days ago would look.

[Theosaurus-Rex]

It's not the cute direction the new logo/mascot is going in, but I had fun breaking out the felt-tips and colouring pencils to see how my what-if-Lucy-was-a-flamingo idea I had a couple days ago would look.

I love this! I feel like something like this could work super well as a logo in conjunction with a matching mascot with a more complex and characterized design maybe? But it's such a good vibe ✨

[lpil]

The flamingo / Lucy merging is cool! One thing I think we'd need to be careful with is how that looks at small sizes. Currently Lucy doesn't scale well.

hemarkable on twitter says:

I honestly like Gleam's mascot which looks like Staryu. Maybe giving few more features to your Staryu could be enough?

More Pokemon! 💜

[synecdokey]

This is my lunch break contribution to this, it's highly unrefined, and lacks a mascot. Probably needs thicker strokes for small-size legibility, and tweaking the colours slightly, but here we go! I liked the idea of a 'beam' of light, with added sparkles for good measure. Keeps the gleam pink, but with a blue sky, and white sparkles that stand out.

[nadavhames]

Maybe the style for a fun, cute mascot can be similar to this panda from https://panda-css.com

[ORESoftware]

Flamingo dancing with Starfish!!

[kamikyoku]

[a bit of an infodump here so take your time]

I'm not really a programmer by profession, but I do love making art related to programming, especially with the mascots. Here's my take on the Gleam mascot, a somewhat cute, glow-in-the-dark starfish. The second option is a starfish that ended up looking like a gemstone-thing (I don't know, looks weird).

I tried playing around with the starfish's expressions, to see if things just fit for some reason. Note that this isn't the final design, and I made this under an hour for fun.

Forgive me if the colors look a little lighter (technical issues, I guess). And forgive me if I don't seem to be kind (this is the first time I've posted something here, so something of a new experience to me).

(Sidenote here if you love some trivia, the current working name for the starfish is Aster).