I really don’t like these logos that are boxes with text in the lower right. The post cites a “common design language” with other tech but this has to be the most low effort language imaginable.
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An entire generation of web designers grew up with their heads stuck in the Adobe ecosystem, so this must look like the gold standard to them.
At least Adobe made an effort to make their logos look like symbols on the periodic table.
Perhaps those brutalist logos were designed specifically such that they could be rendered using CSS itself? Though I could understand why they'd want to distance themselves from the old "shield" logo that turned out to signify shielding "browser vendors" from broad implementation of CSS renderers and to keep a niche of job security at W3C, Inc. due to rampant and unwarranted complexity, but in any case was burnt by being placed next to vulgar metalhand vectors, not to speak of being culturally discriminative when viewed in a "woke" interpretation.
[1]: https://ih0.redbubble.net/image.13378023.4114/raf,750x1000,0...
Which visual impairment exactly will find it easier to parse the previous logos (which are a mess of design scarcely related to the actual technology name) than the current ones, which contain thick bold text indicating exactly what the technology is called?
The most important part about convoying that an item is CSS is including the letters CSS. So while I am a little disgusted they wasted time on an icon at all, I will admit that many of our design language structures demand an icon. So I am somewhat relieved they managed to dodge the design for design's sake crowd and picked the best possible one. A non-descript box with the letters CSS in it.
It appears this option was discussed: https://github.com/CSS-Next/css-next/issues/105#issuecomment...
Or clones of Adobe’s lame branding.
Whether that applies here is naturally subjective, but hearing that changed how I look at logo designs a bit.
And they’re not even consistent. Three of them are squares, two of them are different shapes, and despite the simplicity even something as trivial as the font size and spacing isn’t uniform.
Logos are sometimes printed on shirts (in monochrome, or where rich coloring costs extra), or embroidered onto hats, or read at a distance (like conference booth posters), or printed to B/W official letterhead, or scaled down for an icon pack. A 3rd party will include a logo on something with a preexisting style, and it should look okay there.
A logo which is structurally simple and uses few colors can be easily adapted to these scenarios — printed in black-and-white, or as an outline without solid colors.
A lot of it would still get that reaction, I think, if a programmer presented them instead of a designer, and these look to me like they’d be among them.
We didn't get that it was supposed to be a logo or a brand though.
Labels like this look like placeholders. They leave you feeling empty and convey a sense of amateurishness.
These do provoke a visceral response. It's not an "Oh!", nor even an "oh?", but rather an "oh..."
The "brand guidelines" will be broadly disrespected since the mental threshold for brand awareness is higher than the entropy of a square.
CSS is not a technology that needs eye-catching marketing. The existence of branding is mostly just for the purposes of giving someone something to put on a powerpoint slide, or a sticker to put on a laptop. It's allowed to be boring.
In addition, it exists as part of a family of web technologies, so giving it consistent branding with the other web technologies makes sense. You can argue that whoever first came up with this simple sort of branding was unimaginative (I think the JS logo was the first?), but just because something is simple doesn't mean it's not capable of being iconic.
That said:
> A lot of it would still get that reaction, I think, if a programmer presented them instead of a designer, and these look to me like they’d be among them.
Weren't the logos in TFA made and voted on by programmers?
Also people actually use them, a while back every CS student inexplicably had these stickers on their laptop. I can't see these new logos being ever used as stickers because they're just... nothing.
> Do not rely on color alone to denote information
> Use additional cues or information to convey content
The old icons were certainly ugly. But they had a unique shape (cue) and didn't rely on color. The new logo has text which helps, but this is where visual impairment becomes an issue (lack of focus to read said text).
I have no intent to take away from the meaningful choices made in this logo's design. But even just picking a unique shape for each component would go a long way.
They use the words vote and community, but actually taking them seriously means accepting the Boaty McBooatface when it happens.
I liked the offset logos because they served just as well as logos and were a good humoured nod towards CSS issues that it would be worthwhile keeping in mind for a bit of humility.
Don't let the warts of the real implementation get you down, it's a delight how everything I want to do is just part of the vanilla stack now, one way or another.
The text in in random sizes and different fonts for no reason. The shapes are not all the same or all different; they are just randomly different.
It's not that any one logo looks bad; they look awful because they are _incoherent_.
Comparison, in monochrome at small size: https://i.imgur.com/3UvKKtg.png
