Logo competition - we have a winner!

Sweet logo! Congrats Paul!

Congratulations!

That is one nifty logo. Congratulations! :)

Oh… really… this is just… I mean, this was a contest, if this is the best one, what did the other participants send??

Probably something more suiting to your tastes. :-) Don’t forget that nobody has the same tastes. I have seen some posted designs that I liked a lot more than this one. I also like mine better, but I could be a bit biased for mine ;-). Congrats to the winner!

Uhhhh you DO realize that Linux is a penguin, Macs are Apples, and Microsoft uses a paned-glass window?

I find this Logo very classy, and color schemes can change, although I have to admit, that warm purple is growing on me by the minuet!

Congratulations to the winner, and I really like all the thought that was put into it… it looks Great!

snarky remark, Ohem Gee. What did your entry look like?

Nice choice. I like it. I love that it’s a buckyball too. Clever stuff.

Simple, unique to remember – I like it :)

Very nice. Now I’m excited waiting for the release of the R-PI.

What’s the prize?

Hey ffuentes, from the original competition post:

“The prize winner will see their logo used (and will be able to claim bragging rights forever), and will receive a Model B device and an invitation for two to our launch party (date tbc).”
– http://www.raspberrypi.org/?p=55

Congratulations, of course, to the winner, well done, but….

Where was a written explanation invited to support a design and where were we told it would even be considered? Nowhere I could see. Would this design have been chosen without the written rationale, standing on its own merits?

The fact that the team seem to have chosen a logo on the basis of intellectual inside knowledge rather than appeal to the target audience says a lot more about the world they inhabit than anything else.

I would assume they decided on the logo due to it being an easily recognizable raspberry, using few colours and due to the stencil nature. On top of that it’s a classy and minimalistic logo, while still managing to have visual depth.

Was there other logos presented in the forums that looked better? Perhaps, but that’s subjective. Many of them also used gradients and complex patterns, which was to be avoided.

And what exactly is the target audience supposed to know about proper logo design? We might have ended up with a logo that’s so complex it’s difficult to reproduce, print, etc., ultimately more costly to display and maintain, or becoming unrecognizable once you remove the colour from it.

I think the final choice is fine, anyway. Simple, yet playful.

I keep seeing a face in it.

Congratulations! Wouldn’t have been my personal choice from the entries I saw, but well-deserved indeed.

@whoop, it’s more like they choose the logo and then the additional intellectual inside knowledge made the choice that much cooler

Abishur is on the money there – it didn’t affect the decision, but we did think it was mighty cool.

I do not know my logo concept was arrived right in time (I sent it 3 minutes before end of time) but i have posted my concept for those who would like to see another logos. Please take a look at my website address, there is logo.

This concept contains three things:
1) It looks like PCB/circuit-board
2) Pi sign is contained too
3) If you look carefully, entire shape looks like raspberry fruit

Will be nice if someone from foundation tell me, was my logo arrived right in time? By the way why wasn’t used auto responding feature in mail box for anyone who sent own concept?

It is enough to click in my nickname but it can be pretty tricky, so there is my link: http://kyrol.vot.pl/raspberrypi.png

seriously?

yeah

At first glance, my thoughts were, “people might think we’re a fruit vendor with this logo”. And then Apple’s name came to mind. I guess this is where branding comes in.

The more I look at it the more I like it. Well done!

Lovely. Simple, clear, bright, memorable and compact, plus all of the advantages of reproducibility that you rightly mention. I look forward to seeing this emblazoned around the web!

i’m calling dibs on “Raspberry Pi Bug” & “RasPi Bug”…
i keep on seeing a bug and a face in it…

Congrats Paul!.. well done!.. c”,)

The face is an easy spot with the arrangement of the 3 circles at the front, but the bug is not something I’d considered and is a good spot and totally your dibs it seems :D

Mutant Ladybird could be the Raspi version of the Logo Turtle :-)
http://cyberneticzoo.com/?p=1711

I really like the logo, but why is it purple? Also, Congratulations to Paul Beech!

I would suppose because really ripe raspberries look purple. And besides, who doesn’t like purple?

There is a lot of good work and symbolism here – love the buckyball motif and relevent numbers. Congrats to the winning designer !!!

But I gotta confess it doesn’t reach out and grab me as a “oh, yeah, that’s totally IT” design. The visible leaves are fat and jagged like bramble branch leaves and not slender and smooth like the five calyx projections on top of a real raspberry. The use of branch leaves instead of a calyx on top of the berry makes the logo look more like a pineapple than a raspberry to me.

http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/life/botany/raspberry-info.htm

Plus it’s kind of a weird unrealistic perspective – somehow the berry is being viewed from below it’s horizontal equatorial plane and yet you can see the entire leaf on its top. To me the designer is trying for a variation on the classic Apple logo, which is fine – but the Apple logo perspective is dead bang flat view from the side. This is different and upon first viewing leaves my subconscious uneasy, like I am viewing some kind of optical illusion that I am struggling to figure out – which I am.

And finally, it’s totally the wrong color. Purplish? Really? I would suggest a new contest where you take this design and display it in about ten different colors – the existing purple along with nine other RGB colors selected from random reddish pixels in the raspberry photo at the top of all your webpages. Tally the votes by color. The purple will come in dead last.

Enough party pooping. It’s a nice design that will look good in a small square. Congrats again to the designer !!! Onward !!!

Well, I am wrong in several specifics of my post above. After reading the text in my earlier posted link more carefully, I see that raspberrys do indeed come in a purple color, which results from crossbreeding between the red and black varieties – but it’s a very dark purple, almost black.

Also, here’s a link to another image of a raspberry that shows the logo leaves are in fact a very reasonable representation of the calyx “leaves”.

http://www.fruittiyogi.com/images/fruit_raspberry.jpg

The perspective is still a little odd to me in the logo, tho…

Actually, I think this may be an issue with your monitor. Could you take a screen grab and email me a bitmap if you get a moment? I just want to check there isn’t a colour rendering error. liz@raspberrypi.org

Hey Ricky, thanks for your well-considered criticism.

I agree on how the colour has come out here, explanation and apology below :-)

With regards to the brambles/calyx (great word :-) and perspective, I did try versions with the leaves draped more naturally, but it lacked the Cayce Pollard factor of the more abstract layout.

If you see the fruit as a true elongated raspberry then yes, the perspective would be off and this would need to be addressed in a 3d model. As a more traditional buckyball abstraction I see it as less of a problem.

I intentionally went for the bramble leaves rather than thin calyx for three reasons. Firstly for pleasing proportions and impact, secondly to indicate the growth of the platform (people in the forums have already mentioned brambles as a name for add-ons :-). Thirdly, the more spindly calyxes could be mistaken for a strawberry.

I did brambles in the same way the bite in the Apple logo makes it distinctly not a cherry.

Again, thanks for the valid and thoughtful criticism :-)

congratulations to the winner

Congratulations to the winner. Afraid I’m not that keen though. Oh well.

unbiased opinion…
awful

Hi Adam. I’m sorry your entry didn’t win – as you can probably tell, in our unbiased opinion, we don’t think the winner is awful at all.

‘unbiased’

I don’t think that word means what you think it means.

^ +1

Neat! I see a ladybug and sometimes, a Shy Guy. Will there be stickers?

There will – we’re hoping for large ones and for stickers which will be just the right size to cover up the Windows key on your keyboard.

Ha ha — if my keyboard had a windoze key, that would be so worth it :)

I have to say, I like it. It’s simplistic, clean, and symmetrical. It looks a lil un-raspberry-like, but that adds to the symmetry. Good choice.

This was my submission!

http://www.tmeyer.info/download/raspberry_portfolio.png

Congratulations!

Think people should remember the designers mantra ‘the client is always right’!

I disagree completely – just because someone likes something more does not meant that is it more commercially viable or able to convey the brand concept adequately.

Congratulations, nice logo, finally we can all rest. I thought it needed the words “Raspberry Pi” on it? That was the hardest thing to achieve!

Good work though, can’t wait to get my hands on one!

It does have accompanying text for the occasions (like letterheads and signage) where we need it – we left it off here so you could just see the graphical element.

Brilliant logo Paul
Simple but effective

I love it – but I hate the vein running through the leaf – It makes it look like its frowning at me. I think it would look better with the leaves as a solid colour without the vein but I’m loving its simplicity.

I also thought about having three stripes of colour running through the ‘balls’ – in a homage to Apple or Commodore but that’s just me lol

Hey xxxstarmanxxx,

I did try it without the vein in the leaves, but it lost a little definition and wasn’t quite so drawing to the eye, especially when it’s in one colour.

If you turn it upside down, then it does look a bit like a frowing Wilford Brimley http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000979/

It’d be great to see corruptions and homages to other great platforms which I’m sure will come, but for now it’s as simple as I could make it as a place to start for the look and feel of the Raspi :-)

I really dislike the logo – It looks more like unripe blackberry… and what about the “Pi” part of title? Nothing! It makes it even more forgettable… But it’s all my opinion : o

I would love a stress ball of this design.

I like it, but it’s a bit symmetrical. The buckyball being so is fine, but the two leaves look like mirror images and I feel a bit of asymmetry here would greatly help the “softness” of the logo; it feels very “drawn by maths” at the moment, and not in a good way.

Congrats Paul! Enjoy your free slice of Pi!

This looks quite cute for a rasberry logo!
Nice.

Hi,
first of all congratulations to the winner!

I didn’t take part in the competition and so I should have an unbiased opinion on the logo:

All in all its nice, but I don’t like the leaves and the color of the fruit should be a lot darker…

Is there any chance that there will be like 5 varieties of the logo for us to vote on!?

That would be a really cool thing!

Moritz

Congratulations to the winner. That design is going to look great on t-shirts!

I’m Paul, the guy who designed the amazing/abominable* logo above.

Thanks for the ‘grats and criticism. I’ll respond to a few of the specific points above in a bit to clarify or address things as I see them (which is my opinion and not that of the foundation, to be clear :-)

Generally, yes, the design should appear more raspberry in colour then it seems here. By that I mean, not quite red, but definitely not purple. This is my fault for designing in CYMK on a wide-gamut monitor calibrated for print and then not checking the colour profile was set properly on other monitors when exported from EPS. Looks like RGB #e7113c is closer to what I’d expect. Mea culpa.

If I’ve underplayed the Pi/Pie aspect, it because the ideas I tried along those lines always ended up too fussy and indistinct and I felt that the Raspi needed something that would be eye-catching, friendly and recognisable worldwide even when photocopied badly in one colour and without any supporting text.

While you can’t please all the people all the time, I did go for something simple enough to have room to grow. It’s be easy as pie to anthropomorphise (y’know, for kids) and some people have already seen this, which makes me smile :)

Influence wise, it might help to think of it as the love child of the Apple logo and Bibendum. http://guru.gg/lovechild.png

* delete as appropriate.

Hi Paul,

Firstly, congrats.

Secondly, can you clear up exactly what your entry consisted of? Just an EPS and JPG? Surely the JPG would have had the correct colours? That should be displayed above.

And what about the explanatory text? That wasn’t in the rules, so I hope that was asked for at a later point? Sorry for all the questions.

Anyway, well done.

My entry consisted of the email with jpg and eps scrupulously formatted to suit the rules, just in case they were ruthlessly adhered to and also a contact sheet of variations as that was mentioned as OK in the comments of the original contest post.

I’ve mentioned in other comments where the purple issue crept in. My bad with print proof setup on wide-gamut monitor. It looked more red to *me* :-)

If you read the comments above by Liz it’s seems that the rules were enforced for selecting the winner. Ask Liz for any clarification on that as it’s her competition :-)

Sneaky.

That’s nothing, you should what happened in the Nobel Prize for Medicine this year. Some people will go to any lengths I tell ya.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/oct/03/nobel-prize-awarded-dead-scientist?newsfeed=true

Hi, Paul! Congrats!
One question is whether there would be problems with the registration of your logo? After such an obvious image of raspberries often been used as a part of the logo as well as separately, many people before
Sorry for my Google-English :)

Congratulations Paul. Going back to my earlier comment, is one leaf a mirror of the other? http://www.raspberrypi.org/?p=221#comment-3048

As requested above, I have emailed both the JPG that is downloaded from your server as well as a PNG (lossless, exact color duplication) screen grab from my monitor with both the logo and your header raspberry photo in the same image. I sent the email to info@raspberrypi.org and it has the title “Logo Color Test Images Attached”. For the record, my monitor is a Dell 2007FP running with a VGA analog signal. My monitor settings are for “PC” and not “MAC” and I am using the default “PC Normal” color setting. This is about as plain vanilla a monitor setup as you can get. Sorry, the logo still looks purple to me, both on its own and especially in comparison with a photo of the actual fruit nearby.

You have a lot of people seeing purple here. I say welcome to the wonderful world of LCD monitor color calibration. Back in the day there was the magic list of “browser safe colors” because everybody had different levels of color fidelity in their (cheap or expensive) graphics cards hooked up to their CRT monitors. Today everybody has 24 bit “true color” graphics chips/cards but they have ditched the old tried-and-true CRT monitor for LCD ones with much stranger color reproduction qualities. Everybody’s moitor settings today are all over the map and we need a “browser safe color map” more than ever – but that’s impossible now because of the wide variation in LCD panels. You may want to read the following page:

http://www.normankoren.com/makingfineprints1A.html#Monitor_test_pattern

and download the following tools:

QuickGamma (helps set LCD monitors to the “standard gamma” of 2.2):

http://www.mediafire.com/?226ei8dc28d1361

Meazure (a great little screen grab utility that can display the RGB color of a selected pixel):

http://www.brothersoft.com/meazure-143275.html

Again for the record, using the QuickGamma tool above I have to use a QuickGamma setting of 1.92 on my monitor to get a visual gamma at my eye of 2.2 which is the target you are supposed to shoot for. And sorry, the logo still looks purpleish and not raspberry-reddish to me no matter what gamma setting I use. Scanning around with the Meazure RGB pixel measuring pointer, there are obvious RGB color range differences between the color of the logo and the natural color of raspberries. You are just using two different areas of the CIE 1931 color space here.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIE_1931_color_space

And since I’m back in commentary mode, I’ve thought a little bit more about the “subconsious optical illusion” aspect of the logo a bit more, becasue when I look at the logo it just doesn’t look “right” to me. And I think I’ve got it – or at least another portion of the logo experience that I can now verbalize. I started by reading your words that it was a buckyball with lots of numeric symbolism – 32 sides that can stand for a 32 bit processor, 11 sides shown that can stand for the ARM version. Hey, I think, that’s cool, and sure enough it’s got 11 sides showing. But….but…hey, that’s not a buckyball. A buckyball isn’t made from circles, it’s made with 20 regular hexagons and 12 regular pentagons. And there’s no kind of physical object made from 32 identical regular circles that can show 11 circles on the visible side and have the other 21 circles on the opposite, invisible side. That’s the very definition of an optical illusion – and a physical impossibility.

As a math geek I kinda hate to see what will be many kids’ “first exposure to the concept of a buckyball” be “this RaspberryPi logo”. I humbly suggest you consider refraining from references about buckyballs when discussing the logo.

One last thing – the logo is attempting to depict a “sphere” made of “circles” – sure, lots of refernces to “pi” there. A real buckyball isn’t spherical and has nothing to do with circles – it is simply a volume enclosed by 32 regular polygons, with each polygon creating a flat (not “curved” or “bulging”) surface defining the volume. There really isn’t any “pi” terms in the description of a buckyball like there is in a true sphere or circle.

It’s even worse than that, buckyballs are technically the carbon molecule, which has no faces at all and the placement of the apparent spheres in the logo doesn’t match the C60 layout.

Since we’re talking truncated icosahedrons in a very correct sense though, your point stands.

I chose the pattern as buckyballs/icosahedrons are damn cool, used as the basis for footballs and since a big focus for the Raspi is education, I thought it’s a nice aspect of the design.

If you measure the design, there are circles/spheres enough in there, and once the colour is sorted it’s definitely hitting the Raspberry angle pretty hard :-)

Buckyballs as a geometrical object (whether implemented with points, carbon atoms or as a soccer ball / football) are indeed damn cool.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/41/C60a.png

And despite all of my picky points, I think your design as an artistic effort is damn cool too. Congrats.

And that’s my final word. ;-)

Nice one. The missus thinks it looks like a hand grenade – but she also thought the young Jeff Bridges was real in Tron Legacy.

Agree with the comment about assymetrical leaves though…

Wait, if the raspberry has 32 bits won’t that mean it’ll take 4 bytes to eat it? That’s gotta be some huge raspberry! Joking aside, it looks great and that weird buckyball stuff is interesting.

wow, good design , I like it much than mine hehe, congratulations!!

here is mine :)

http://fc03.deviantart.net/fs70/i/2011/281/7/c/raspberry_pi_by_arisuhige-d4c6hk0.png

Glad you like it. Thanks for entering! We didn’t have many people who figured out a good way to use the pi character as leaves; most people who included a pi as part of the raspberry used it as the stalk, which is hard to make look good because of the two downstrokes, so yours stood out.

Of course, in general, when you pick a raspberry, you don’t get stalk….

Just sayin’.

Thanks ^^ , I had no idea of how to put the pi symbol with a raspberry, but finally I’ve thought that design hehe, I’m not a designer so for me it’s good to participate :)

@arisu hige

I thought your design was tremendously better looking than the one chosen. Along with another commentor, I thought the winning design looked like a logo used to sell juice. It’s too fat, looks like a bug getting ready to take flight. I’m not saying I hate it, it just doesn’t “look right” to me. Congratulations on your effort!

Very nice logo. Congrats!
However, I also think it needs some professional tweaking before going public. In my opinion the leaves have too much detail around the edges which makes the logo appear not so abstract as a tech logo and instead looks like a fruit juice brand! Then again what do I know :))
Overall, well done!
Cheers

Quote of the competitive requirements:
“We need to register the logo as a trademark, which means that your logo can’t resemble or be derived from any other logo or copyrighted image.”
I thought it was serious))

It doesn’t infringe any of those, Oleg (I’m happily confident on this stuff: I trained as a lawyer before running off into publishing). A similar logo would have to be VERY similar (loads of companies have, to pick an example from the air, apples as their logos, but there’s a world of variety in them. A similar logo would also have to be in a very similar business line for legal issues to arise. There aren’t any other raspberry-looking small computing platforms. Blackberry is probably the closest, and we were careful to stay well away from anything that looked like their logo.

The detail of your requirements for participants are not in doubt. It has been said, – “… can’t resemble …”
As a result of this is confusing. But if you say no problem, I agree.

You made the contest logo RPi public act.
You set the rules, and they were described in great detail, to avoid problems.

Maybe you could get a better result if you said that you need

or just search in google and put in all the fame

It’s a Beech Ball!

I’ll get me coat.

I have strong feelings about the logo. About what it should be and what hard work I know it has to do. – what the logo should do in order to do justice to such a fantastic concept as the raspberry pi. 40 years in design and advertising have taught me this.

So instead of criticising the rusty trustees’ choice or the winner’s design, what needs to be done now is to tighten this thing up as much as possible and the winner is the man to do it. To criticise it in any other light is churlish and simply smells of sour grapes on my part, to quote another fruity metaphor.

I think there is scope for some tweaking and further simplification. Those fine-toothed leaves will surely fill in when silkscreened onto a PCB, you will lose them and the edges will simply look wobbly – they will not look crisp and not give the desired effect.

What another person has mentioned, and I personally find disturbing also, is the apparent discrepancy of perspective we see in the logo. The buckyball, erm I mean raspberry, is as seen from a little below sideways on. Yet the two leaves appear as if face on to us, which is un-natural because the leaves would sprout from the stem of the berry and sit flatter over it. Actually from the perspective we are invited to view the berry, we would see a little of the underside of the leaf, yet we see it side on.

Now I fully understand that this is a stylised logo and I would cite Mickey Mouse’s ears as an example – they always face us straight on as two circles, whether we see the front of Mickey, or his side. Look, it’s true. He’s only got three fingers too.

But in the case of Mickey, he is always a two-dimensional character and flat, we are not invited as viewers to see any shading or clues as to his 3D nature, except when implied in the movement of him.

In the case of our berry, we are invited to believe it is a true 3-dimensional object – a spherised buckyball. The extra bumps in the outline suggest other drupelets within the aggregate of drupelets that forms the berry, behind it and further back.

So I see a 3D berry, with two very 2D leaves plonked behind it somewhat un-naturally.

I would venture to suggest it is abstracted further – make the berry symmetrical and side on, ditch the extra black bumps in the profile, simplify the leaves’ denticulated edges and make the black linework of uniform thickness. You will then have a killer logo.

With these suggestions, SPOT ON, this logo would be a major improvement to minor problem.

Is it too late to critique? I think making the leaves smooth would make it look better at different scales.

The logo somehow reminds me of goatse

Not looking like goatse was actually one of the considerations we had when looking at the entries – I have to say, if this reminds you of it, is there anything pink and round that doesn’t?

*Sniff, I like it when raspberries look purple. If it’s too red then I don’t think it’d look right.

I agree with Whoop’s comment. No offence to the artist (I love the concept), but I feel as if it should be tweaked, if only a little bit. I hope no one takes my comment as biased, because I didn’t even enter the competition, nor do I have any artistic skill whatsoever.

Congrats to Paul and Raspberry Pi! Great to see things moving along. Absolutely can’t wait :-)

Looks nice.

The logo is clearly distinct and original to my memory. Congrats, and I look forward too seeing it in branding.

Which leads me to a question, do you intend to use the element in that perspective or do you plan to use it rotated (say 45′ counter-clockwise as an example). I look forward to seeing it with the accompanying text as well.

I’m looking forward to seeing it on my ‘B’ board. :)

I don’t know what cool-aid you guys are drinking. The graphic looks nice, buts sucks as the raspberrypi logo. It hardly looks like a raspberry nor is there a reference to pi anywhere. If simplicity was the requirement, probably a red circle would have sufficed. It does not stand out and is not memorable. I hope you post the other finalist logos soon so that I can figure out if the entries were lame or the judges had poor taste. Note that my criticism of the logo is not a reflection of my opinion of the foundation which I think is doing a fantastic job for a admirable goal.

Probably bad taste. But seriously, dfbname – how many email addresses does one person need? We *can* see your IP address, you know…(and thank you for your support – but I do wish you’d stick to the one email. It makes responding to you as one person rather than someone different each time much easier).

Seem to have hit a nerve Liz; that wasn’t my intention. By the way I have only one email address (the second one was a typo by one character). If I wanted to hide something, wouldn’t I have changed my name and not the email?

Sorry – you’re right, you hit a nerve, and I apologise; you’re getting it in the neck as a proxy for some of the *altogether remarkable* emails I’ve had today from some people who appear to have sent in entries which didn’t win and felt bad about not being chosen. (Although the bad feelings have been disguised as hatred for a: the project, b: the logo, and c: me for administering the damn competition. Guys – I can run your email addresses against the database of entries – it’s not rocket science). Again, sorry; I do let this stuff get the better of me sometimes, and it’s not an attractive trait.

I understand and allow me to apologize too. I guess my comments were a bit harsh and it’s easy to criticize (as opposed to actually doing something). Also I did NOT send in an entry so no ill feelings there :)

Liz, I think if you put up a page of what you considered to be the hot contenders then the angry brigade will quieten down when they see the range and diversity of entries.

I am sure the original logo competition said you would put up a gallery of entries, but I am equally sure the volume you received means that you cannot show all, nor do people have a lifetime long enough to view them all.

For the effort everyone put in, they should surely get some kind of feedback – even if people don’t see their logo featured, at least they might see how it compared to the pick of the raspberry crop.

Hey Liz, why don’t you put together an anonymised compilation of all the worst emails – I’d read that for a dollar! Embarrass the hecklers in to silence. Well, fat chance, but hey – a good read nevertheless!

And letting it get the better of you is a good release valve – don’t knock it.

This!

I’ve actually been taken by surprise by the winning logo. I expected a more simplified design that would be better for etching on a pcb. Don’t get me wrong, I love any logo that has heart put into it and has a nice story behind it too.
I wonder if the public would be able to see the rest of the designs that were submitted at least for posterity’s sake. A huge jpg with 64×64 max pixels dedicated for every logo would be nice in a no-comment thread.

I don’t think the logo should be constrained simply to work on PCB more easily but it’s not unreasonable to have a PCB-styled variant of the logo. Non-jagged leaves etc.

There’s a secondary issue here though; who is allowed to carry such a logo on their PCB’s – only official R-Pi product or any of us ?

With the R-Pi brand and logo being copyright protected and/or trademarked there’s a subtle but important difference between “R-Pi interface board” and “Interface board for the R-Pi”, the first being potentially infringing the second not. The R-Pi logo on a PCB may give the impression of an R-Pi ‘official product’ rather than a product for use with R-Pi which has similar issues.

We’re partway through trademarking the logo, so it’ll only be able to be used on official Raspberry Pi products, I’m afraid.

What will this mean for the potential for community re-use? I haven’t seen many straight answers on the “is this an Open Source Project” front, but at least if the logo were some variety of Creative Commons we could adapt it for, say, 3D printed cases?

I’d love to convert this into a DXF and use it to emboss RPi-related designs, but if it’s not CC, I’ll sadly have to not-bother. Even with explicit permission to ignore copyrights or trademarks, it wouldn’t feel very “community”.

That’s down to the people on the business end, not me, but I’d like to see some CC licensing for that sort of application too.

Liz: We’re partway through trademarking the logo, so it’ll only be able to be used on official Raspberry Pi products, I’m afraid.

Eben on slashdot: We’ve said elsewhere that our dream scenario is that someone in China decides to copy our design and start knocking out millions of clones.

http://interviews.slashdot.org/story/11/09/14/1554243/eben-upton-answers-your-questions

Anyone see the irony here of the logo being jealously copyrighted and controlled, yet the Raspberry Pi foundation have said it would be a good thing if the actual thing itself is cloned?

Copy the design everyone, Eben said it’s OK.

We’re happy for people to copy the CONCEPT, and to reproduce the hardware. We want to see $25 computers being made by as many companies as possible.The logo, however, is how folk out there identify whether they’ve got a real Raspberry Pi product. We’re hoping to produce add-on boards next year, and those will be branded so you know they’re from us. Eben will be happy to tell you that himself when he’s online (he’s on aeroplanes much of today).

The logo, however, is how folk out there identify whether they’ve got a real Raspberry Pi product. We’re hoping to produce add-on boards next year, and those will be branded so you know they’re from us.

And you will be able to enforce this with the Chinese clones how, exactly?

I know you’re just arguing for the sake of it (why would the inability to enforce it with one group make us give up with the rest of the world?), but you do raise a really interesting point. Eben and I were in Beijing to try to find out more about shanzhai (literally “mountain fortress” – how awesome is that?) knockoffs of electronics in particular last May, and managed to get our hands on a copy of a Nokia N8 only 2 days after the phone was announced, and many months before it shipped, by visiting an electronics market up by the 8th ring road and drawing lots of pictures, miming and smiling a lot. (My Dad’s Chinese, but he forgot to teach me or my brother any of the language because he was insistent we grow up all nice and European.)

The phone’s innards were, of course, completely different from the real thing, and the scale was off slightly; the proportions were correct but it was a bit larger than the real N8. Impressively, they’d managed to source exactly the right shade of revolting green metallic plastic pellets to make the casing – and TBH, the workings of the phone, with 2 sims and some Chinese-language features, were going to be much more useful to the people buying it than a 12 megapixel camera and swishy 3d.

But it was really noticeable that all of these knockoffs were branded NCKIA rather than NOKIA, as were the things we saw in other cities and at other markets. There’s much more of a tendency in this direction (fudging the branding rather than copying it directly) in electronics than there is in the fake luxury or consumer goods market (we also met with American Dairy, who escaped the whole melamine scandal – they said it’s surprising how your market share increases when all your competitors get executed – and a manufacturer of sports shoes I probably shouldn’t mention by name, specifically to talk about counterfeiting). It seems that the shanzhai electronics industry has rather different motivations from, say, the knockoff training shoe industry. They aren’t trying to fool the customer into thinking he’s buying a real Nokia phone; they want you to know that the product is, in fact, shanzhai: this is useful information for the consumer because it means it is cheaper, it probably has features (like those dual sims) that are more meaningful to the user, but still has all that fancy lurid green styling. There’s also a degree of national pride in the fast turnaround (TWO DAYS post-announcement!) and the fact that Chinese engineering’s actually pretty damn snappy when it comes to this kind of thing.

Where we fit into this with a device that’s already as cheap (we think, although we’d love to be proved wrong) as it’s possible to make it, I’m not sure. It’ll be fascinating to find out. But China’s a market it’s very hard for us to sell into for political reasons in the first place, and I don’t expect cloned and branded Chinese Raspis to have enough value to the manufacturer to be sold in huge numbers outside those countries we can’t get into for those same political reasons. Inside those countries, they’ll be doing good, which is ultimately what we’re trying to do. Even more than that, though, we want to see a new paradigm across the whole industry where the $25 PC is a thing many companies are making, with their own branding.

Cool logo, and very easy to print, even with screen-printing. If you want T-shirts/polos/sweatshirts, drop us a line at freewear.org :)

Raspberry Pi logo gets RISCOScode ‘like’.
http://www.RISCOScode.com

I’ve said my final word on the logo itself and that final word is congrats.

However, in my earlier discussion I listed the following photo as an example of bramble leaves shape in calyx projections.

http://www.fruittiyogi.com/images/fruit_raspberry.jpg

My bad, fruittiyogi is a smoothy drink website and I now believe that raspberry image is photoshopped to make it distinct from their strawberry image, which uses an actual calyx. Silly, silly me to use a commerical website for botanical info resorce.

If you want to know for the record what a real raspberry calyx and branch leaf looks like, use this image page from aphotoflora which was shot in the wild in England:

http://www.aphotoflora.com/d_rubus_idaeus_raspberry.html

Ok, skip the leaf and you’re all done!!! :)

Awesome!
Mine would’ve just been the Pi logo next to a raspberry :/

I absolutely love the design that was chosen. I cannot wait for it to go into production so I can obtain a unit, also will there be stickers available I would love to show my support everywhere. Thanks.

Congrats to the winner. The graphic has nice lines and looks pretty but I wouldn’t have chose it myself as I don’t think it’s simple enough to be recognisable in a 1cm square space which was what was in the brief. I also don’t see the words ‘raspberry pi’ anywhere which I thought must be included. That narrows the space down again. Maybe it wasn’t necessary to include it but the brief should have mentioned that especially because it’s such a long name. I would have chosen a monotone logo too.

Yes, the purple coloration is horrid, please go with something closer to the actual raspberry picture at the top of the website. Other than that, not bad!

Excellent logo, would wear it on a shirt without any hesitation – well done to Paul!

heh honestly not what i thought you guys would have chose

where is the pi? doesn’t look like a buckyball..and that wouldn’t really remind you of pi
“…doesn’t have any holes of the sort that would prevent us from using cutouts” was this mentioned in what you wanted?

i’ll agree that it looks like some kind of raspberry
doubt mine would have won but just sayin, doesn’t seem like what you were after

Cool logo and a nice design, it suits the Raspberry Pi perfectly :D

In response to those who commented that there was no wording – I believe the original entry does have wording – it just hasn’t been displayed in the version you have seen yet.

The overly purple colouring is a result of bad conversion from CMYK – its being sorted, although you can get very purple raspberries.

Take a look here http://www.riscoslondonshow.co.uk/index.php and you can see the logo in use – and it doesn’t look too bad at all when shrunken down a bit.

Congratulations on the logo :) can’t wait for the boards. You could maybe include a set of stickers. The same way Arduino does. It would look nice on my laptop :)

Really like the logo and it scales well. It’s cute though not in a Pepa Pig way. Actually looking [b]friendly[/] and quite soreen so what’s there not to like?

[…] via Raspberry Pi […]

[…] Source: Raspberry Pi […]

Hm, I don’t really like that logo, for it doesn’t really look like a raspberry and has no hint of Pi in it.
But I would really appreciate if you could post some of the other good contest entries anywhere on this site, because I think many people (including me of course ;) ) would really like to see what others have done.
Can’t wait to get a Raspi in my hands, though… :D

BTW, I haven’t designed a logo myself, so it’s not jealousy speaking… ;)

[…] via Raspberry Pi […]

I really like this design, it’s clear, bright and bold. And I especially like the way the numbers fit!
Congratulations Mr Beech.

[…] via Raspberry Pi […]

[…] Source: Raspberry Pi […]

Boy i’m glad my entry didn’t win!

Congrats to the winner… hope you survive the selection!

I think the people who entered and are criticizing this logo are probably really cheap people, and don’t want to pay for the board and instead get one for free?

Well I have to agree I expected something cleaner and more refined. All congrats to the deserved winner but it just doesn’t feel like what I was expecting based on the client brief.

I’m bemused by the purple colourations, bad CMYK conversion? What? Surely if you/ and or the designer know anything about colour profiles there should be zero problem here.

I did enter the competition and really don’t want to sound sour but I’m not impressed by the result here. Just browsing the few entries on the forum I can pick a handful that feel more suited. I understand the client wants to establish a certain brand etc, but it looks like… clip-art, dare I say it.

I also agree it fails to meet the specifications requested, identifiable at 1x1cm. Pah’ you would have to rejig the entire illustration to make that work, 2 colour or one colour? It’s gonna look pretty paltry.

Just my 2 cents, I probably sound upset or grumpy. I’m just being honest.

@Mark McAndrew: Hand grenade… that’s also the first thing that came to my mind.

I also agree with @Ralph Corderoy’s comment about symmetry. My suggestion: rotate the logo 45 degrees (more or less) either to left or right. Changing the leaves is not that important, but it would help a bit. Getting rid of side-to-side symmetry would help eliminate the grenade look.

Then again, I would love it even more if it was supposed to look like a hand grenade.

[…] via Raspberry Pi […]

Wow, what a reaction!

Come on people… let’s let these guys get back to making a little piece of nerd heaven. It’s only a logo, and a nice little one at that. We would all have loved to have our slice of the pie (snigger).
@Raspberry_pi guys, with all this fuss over a logo, can you imagine the kerfuffle there would be if the finished product didn’t live up to expectations?! (Don’t doubt you for a second though).

I know what’s on my Christmas list…

Love the logo! It’s simple, and welcoming, as others have said the buckyball portion of it is just gravy. Can’t wait to get my hands on a Raspberry Pi or 10. Hope they come with decals that I can annoy my wife with by putting them all over the place. =)

Damn! First off i sent in an entry and didnt win and to that i say congratulations to the winner! thats all! all these people whining about whats wrong with the logo or how theres was better, the only people who can tell you what was better is the client and they chose the winner.

I like it!
Congratulations !

I would like to comment regarding this:

“We’re happy for people to copy the CONCEPT, and to reproduce the hardware. We want to see $25 computers being made by as many companies as possible.The logo, however, is how folk out there identify whether they’ve got a real Raspberry Pi product. We’re hoping to produce add-on boards next year, and those will be branded so you know they’re from us.”

All of the above goals are adequately addressed by asserting that your new logo is a trademark.

None of the above goals require a proprietary copyright of the logo. In fact, they would be better addressed with a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. Unlike a proprietary copyright, which does not restrict fair use, CC BY-SA requires that even fair use by attributed to you. It also has the welcome side effect of allowing Wikipedia to label the Rasberry Pi Wikipedia page with your logo, attributed to you.

For a good example of this, go to wikimedia.org and search on “slackware”. You will find that all Slackware logos are released under free licenses. This has not in any way stopped Slackware from vigorously defending their trademark.

I would also point out that at the moment you are not doing everything you can to protect your new trademark. You should put a tiny TM in the image now, and replace it with a R within a circle when and if it gets registered.

Please reconsider the proprietary copyright and instead release the image under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.

Did you guys forget to post the runners-up? Or will it still be awhile?

I was wondering that myself. Any news on when the runners-up will be posted?

I love the fact that it’s round, and that a lot of circles are involved – involves that “Pi” part of the name so much more…

Hi, I just heard about Raspberry Pi tonight. I don’t care too much for the logo (no offense), but I think it could be a good starting point. I feel that a brighter color, more raspberry-ish shape, skewed leaves, and a less regular border to imply shadow would look nice, but I’m not an expert by any means.

Here’s a quick attempt at showing what I mean. http://i.imgur.com/qC2eT.png

Despite my opinions, congrats to the winner!

I’m missing the list and graphics of the other competition logos, too. At least the best ten (or 25) should be shown here – as announced more than a week ago.

At the moment, we have postponed our plan to showcase the best of the non-winning logos – the direct result of some of the trolling email we received after we made the decision on a winner, and the somewhat ungenerous tone (I am being polite here) of some people who didn’t win. When emotions have dried down a bit, we’ll reconsider. Basically, folks, if you don’t behave properly, you can’t have nice things, which is something you really ought to have learned years before you learned how to type.

Hmm, that’s bad – hopefully only for the moment. I hope to see them soon. Best regards.

May we see the other entries yet, pretty please?

May I chip in the suggestion that the product name could be elegantly abbreviated to Raspπ or even Rπ?

Hear, Hear! Well Said Liz.

Un Logotipo excelente, Simétrico y fácil de recordar… muy MAC! Congrats

The logo looks great at the top of this website, and also on the stand materials you can see in the ARM techcon vid. The corrected colours are much warmer and very superior to the first version I saw.

I think discussion about the realism of the leaves is missing the point a bit. It’s meant to be more abstract than that. While the green bits don’t closely resemble the “hat” of a real raspberry (either in terms of angle or shape), they *very* much resemble the leaves of a raspberry plant, so you can think of it almost like a heraldic arrangement: a large, symbolic representation of the fruit itself, with two small raspberry leaves arranged on top of it (not necessarily growing out of it) to make a sort of crest (if the relative littleness of the leaves bothers you, take a look at the Alabama coat of arms, which feature a ship sailing across the top of a shield!).

Either way, we’re starting to see the logo being used for real now, and I think it looks great.

As for indignation about the fact that the written description was apparently taken into consideration, that’s initiative for you. You can’t expect it it to go unrewarded ‘cos not everyone shows it. And as for the lack of cutouts not being specified as part of the design brief, that might not have occurred to the judges until they had some proposals and were thinking about the pros and cons of each. Designers (more so than customers) should be thinking about practicality as well as looks.

Controversy aside, I do hope we’ll see the runners-up soon :o)

No chance of seeing the runner ups, then?

Congrats! I really love the logo, looks very good!

At first glance, my thoughts were, “people might think we’re a fruit vendor with this logo”. And then Apple’s name came to mind. I guess this is where branding comes in.

Congratulations on the logo can’t wait for the boards. You could maybe include a set of stickers. The same way Arduino does. It would look nice on my laptop

[…] Logo competition – we have a winner! | Raspberry PiOct 7, 2011 … The designer points out that a buckyball has 32 faces, and that 11 are visible in the logo – the Raspberry Pi has a 32-bit processor and an … […]

So, about these runner-up logo designs then…?

Made a simple 3D sprite of the logo using HTML and CSS3!
Also checkout the CSS chipset.
http://djazz.mine.nu/files/raspi_css/

Any ideas why the logo in the header seems to have changed colour? That’s not the trademarked colour!

There’s a discussion about this on the forum:
http://www.raspberrypi.org/forum/general-discussion/new-logo/page-2

That is one nifty logo. Congratulations! :)

Is there an EPS file available of the logo?

Any ideas why the logo in the header seems to have changed colour? That’s not the trademarked colour!

No chance of seeing the runner ups then ?

I love everything about this logo. I saw it online somewhere and it caught my eye, that’s the way I got into Raspberry Pi. I am interested in the runners up, it would be cool if you guys would post those.

News

Latest posts

Baby sleep tracker makes parents and babies more rested

Dementia-friendly music player

Make a giant Pomodoro timer using Galactic Unicorn

Meteor beacon for astronomy

Next Post

Raspberry Pi on Newsnight tonight

Previous Post

QML Particles demo videos

Share this post

169 comments

Jay

theslof

Ohem Gee

JP Trudel

acidRain

geosync

AJ

Henrik

Whoop

theslof

Adam Astles

Abishur

cougarten

KyRol

juanRIOT

smorek

Simon

Lloyd Andrew

Thunder__X

tnelsond

rickyjames

rickyjames

ukscone

RichT

TheAdamVP

Daniel

Jay

Neutral_Eyes

Drew Farkas

Tom Meyer

Varrok

asb

Ralph Corderoy

SiR

L_J_S_23

Ralph Corderoy

rickyjames

rickyjames

rickyjames

tnelsond

eben

jamesh

Shellirk

lukzie

statto

Whoop

Shellirk

Palomides

tnelsond

Thunder__X

Neil Rotstan

GZ

dfbname

dfbname

dfbname

Whoop

jamesh

stuporhero

blob

hippy

Whoop

Whoop

rickyjames

Fred

corona27

trista

Brandon

Ivan