Introduction

The Pylons logo is based on akhet (), an ancient Egyptian hieroglyph meaning "horizon", "the place where the sun rises and sets", and "mountain of light" (as they described the sunrise). The bottom part resembles the symbol for "mountain" (); c.f. Egyptian hieroglyphs.) The akhet character also means "pylon", the monumental entrance to an Egyptian temple, and is also related to pyramid (an artificial mountain). So the disc represents the sun peeking over a mountain. Ancient peoples often designed a hole or cutout at the top of temple/shrine walls to allow a sunbeam to pass through it. Whenever the sun's alignment did allow a ray of light to pass through the opening, it was a time for religious rituals. (E Nesbit's book The Enchanted Castle ends with such a mythological occurrence.) The word akhet also meant the flooding season, although a different set of hieroglyphs was used for this.

The word "pylon" also has several other meanings according to dictionary.com:

1. a marking post or tower for guiding aviators, frequently used in races.
2. a relatively tall structure at the side of a gate, bridge, or
avenue, marking an entrance or approach.
3. a monumental tower forming the entrance to an ancient Egyptian
temple, consisting either of a pair of tall quadrilateral masonry
masses with sloping sides and a doorway between them or of one such
mass pierced with a doorway.
4. a steel tower or mast carrying high-tension lines, telephone wires,
or other cables and lines.
5. Aeronautics. a finlike device used to attach engines, auxiliary
fuel tanks, bombs, etc., to an aircraft wing or fuselage.
[Origin: 1840-50; < Gk pyln gateway, gate tower]

Wikipedia also has some additional meanings:

6. a traffic cone. (American)
7. An orange marker designating one of four corners of an American football end zone
8. Support structures for suspension bridges or highways (American)

However, although these are "American" uses, many Americans would not even understand you if you used the word "pylon" for these.

Pylons is focusing primarily on the Egyptian meanings (#3). Electric towers (#4) and electricity may be a secondary theme for some graphics, and the concept of guidance (#1) as a third theme. Note that all these have something in common: light. Light passes through openings in Egyptian pylons, electricity produces light, and light guides the way. Now we're really shedding some light on the subject, if you pardon the pun.

Egyptian theme

Graham Higgins drew a couple akhets as part of his Pylons documentation proposal. Here's a screenshot:

The colored akhet in the section headers shows one potential logo. The outline akhet in the left sidebar remains distinctive even at small sizes, and could be the basis for a favicon.

Response among the Pylons developers has been overwhelmingly positive:

• It's the only logo that no developer has objected to.
• It's significantly different from the logos used by other Python projects [1], and Ben could not find a similar logo used by any company.
• The essence of a hieroglyph is its shape, which can be expressed with any colors or decorations.
• Whereas other logos lose detail and colors in small sizes, the two-color outline is akhet's traditional representation. So even we add decorations to the larger versions, the small ones will not look "deprived".

Mike Orr complains about the tan and lavendar colors in the heading logo. Both are too pale and boring, and look like bad gaudy decorating. Graham says the ugly colors were intentionally chosen so that they wouldn't be mistaken for a final proposal. Mike suggests two brighter, higher-contrast colors, using color patterns rather than solid shades, with black 3-D shading on the edges. Ancient tradition would suggest off-white for both parts (Greek sandstone) or darker tan (Egyptian stone). However, making the ball and holder different colors would probably work better for Pylons. Anarchists use a green sun .

The mountain symbol also resembles the headrests used by Egyptions instead of pillows: 1 2. However, a different the hieroglyph was used for "headrest", so this may be completely irrelevant.

If a large image of Egyptian architecture is used on the main page, Mike suggests a pyramid or a whole pylon rather than a closeup, though the closeup does make the hieroglyphs visible which is nice. The Wikipedia pylon article has some images at the bottom.

[1] Other Python logos include CherryPy's cherries, Django's "DJ", TurboGears' "G" gear, Zope's "Z", Quixote's windmills (unofficial), SkunkWeb's skunk ("Smell the power!"), Twisted's diamond labyrinth, Webware's friendly snake with a wrench, Grok's caveman (or just his club), Werkzeug's construction hammer, etc.

Website's logo, reversed

Alexandre Bourget, thanks to Jean Schurger also.

Bolder variations by Marcin

Marcin Lulek (info@webreactor.eu) made some shinier variations:

Pylons-powered logos featuring the akhet by Graham

Pylons-powered 01

Pylons-powered 02

Semi-transparent akhet, aqua

Semi-transparent akhet, magenta

Pylons button

Pylons cartouches by Graham, for gratuitous decoration.

Pylons cartouche

Pylons cartouche

Pylons 3d cartouche

Pylons cartouche sideways

Pylons cartouche upright

Electrical theme

The other logo proposals all follow an electrical theme. They are listed in order of creation.

Electric towers and electricity are still being considered as secondary themes. However, they are so familiar that the reader may mistake them for other connotations ("telephone", "why the top of a pole?", "they're so ugly", etc). There are also some negative connotations with electricity generation: pollution and nuclear power.

(There was an older non-electrical logo resembling snakeskin scales. All copies have been lost, so if you're the artist or know where the images are, please contact Mike Orr who would like to use it.)

Amateurish contributions by Christoph Haas (Signum)

(Xara Extreme source file in attachments as "signum8a.xar" - MIT license of course)
(Xara Extreme source file in attachments as "signum8b.xar" - MIT license of course)

Some rough ideas in my spare time - Markus Majer (mpathy)

Sorry for the bad quality. I will upload a better one soon.

And perhaps, if I found the bold version of the coolvetica - thanks to Signum for showing there is one - I'll youe that for the lettering. Its good to stay with a free font.

I made a wiki page for my proposals, if they get to much: http://linuxwiki.de/MarkusMajer/PylonsLogoProposal

Note: this was the first runner-up after the akhet. If Markus or somebody can complete the circle in the top left, it may still be used somewhere.

Another approach - Greg Rozon (grozon)

Long time listener, first time caller. Hope I'm not breaking any rules by modifying this page. Thought I'd contribute a few of my own sketches.

A few quick ideas there (all need cleaning). The first (a) is, I think, self explanatory. It's basically a pylon and a symbol for power, playing off the idea of "Pylons Powered". The second (b) attempts to play off the idea that if you take the basic shape of the pylon and build on it with the same shape you can get this infinite repetition of pylons (which for some reason I thought was appropriate). The last (c) is just the same as (b) but with an additional color added for dimension and effect. Anyway, the others are good too but I figured another perspective couldn't hurt even if, as is said above, pylons are boring.

Simple approach - Blaise Laflamme (blaf)

Simple approach combining different exposed ideas

This was the second runner-up after the akhet and the telephone pole. Mike Orr especially likes the third row (black "Pylons" below black "P").

Building off of Christoph Haas's idea (Marcus Cavanaugh)

I like Christoph's idea; I've followed his lead but changed the typeface.

Sam Gilbey's Logos

These logos were designed by Sam Gilbey after being commissioned by James Gardner and Ben Bangert back in 2007. We never liked them enough to make them official. I thought I'd add them here just as a record.

History

The original discussion ocurred in this thread on the mailing list, which was then summarized below in June 2007. Some of the points are now out of date but are left here as a reference.

Christoph Haas:

I'm not sure if you followed the discussion we had on IRC about logos. Yannick Gingras pointed out that http://www.everaldo.com/ is supporting open-source projects. Might be worth a try. The artwork doesn't look ugly.

From IRC (Yannick is not subscribed here):

12:57 < YGingras> Signum: but for the record, they can cost 1k$ but they do
                  support free software.  The best think to do is to ask them
                  what they are willing to do within your budget
12:59 < YGingras> Signum: you can use the contact form on
                  http://www.yellowicon.com/
13:01 < YGingras> Signum: but I have other contacts from designers who made
                  graphics for Ubuntu that will charge much less if price is an
                  issue

Dan wrote:

In general, the things that brought me to Pylons was the 1) speed and libraries of Python and 2) MVC development. Both are not even mentioned on the homepage. It should be in the first paragraph. WSGI seems important, even if I didn't know why, but not a reason I'd choose Pylons over another framework. Its not something that I would say in the first paragraph. I'd say that most people care about two things: speed (both development time and application performance) and stability. These two key points should be the focus of the introduction, to grab the visitors attention. I do think Pylons is flexible, which can be a feature, but it can also be a hindrance... especially for newbies. Thats tricky.

I hate to mention the word, but 'screencasts' is almost a standard. It wouldn't hurt if someone could put one together.

I hope that I'm not coming off as being overly critical. Pylons is a great framework. Keep up the good work!

Antonio Beamud Montero aggreed with Dan and added:

Things to mention:

• In the python way.
• Easy and flexible
• WSGI

Ben said:

I think once we add some additional sitemap data, so that Google  
automatically displays the full description of our site (Pylons  
Framework....) the domain name won't matter much. At this point it  
would prolly be very bad to change domain names, since we could end  
up losing our top Google search result spot for "Pylons" which we  
currently have.

Apparently Jon R. actually has put some screencasts together. This needs chasing up because it is the first I've heard about it but would be great!

Christoph Haas is updating his Pylons into here and some of it may be useful: http://workaround.org/pylons/beginning-pylons.html#what-makes-pylons-stand-out-from-other-frameworks

James Gardner is writing an intro to Pylons for xml.com and the first chapter of a forthcoming Pylons book, these could both be useful too.

Wongobong sends a good email:

In the graphic design business, logos are known as "business
identities". They are pretty important, companies spend a fortune on
them and there are a whole bunch of different methodologies used to
get a 'good' identity. That being said, it really is more of an art
and it would be difficult to get a group of designers to agree on the
best approach to logo discovery.

This video of Paula Scher may be illuminating
http://www.hillmancurtis.com/hc_web/film_video/source/scher.php

If your designer doesn't give you a pad-talk like Paula, you're
getting short changed. 

For the logos that I've helped create, I focused on the way it was
intended to be used. In business communication, you want the logo to
be recognizable despite being presented in different ways. For
example, on a fax, the logo should be recognizable, so it should be
created using a lot of positive and negative space with few gradients
because gradients look like crap on faxes. This requirement will limit
the number of colours the designer can use and in my experience, the
fewer colours the better. If you will never be faxed, this will be
less important.

You generally want the logo to be able to drop to 16x16 or 32x32
pixels and still be recognizable if it is to be used on software. Once
again too much detail and you will run into problems. A fist with two
pylons and lines will shrink to a grey blob. There is a designer trick
where you can use a subset of your logo for the favicon, but the
portion needs to be pretty strong. For example, if your logo is a
green tree with one red leaf then you can put the one red leaf in the
favicon and visitors will 'get it' that your brand is the one red
leaf. You don't have to show the tree. You need a clever designer to
do this; the $150 per logo guys will not give you this kind of work.

The problem your designer will run into is the fact the electrical
pylons are not the most exciting thing in the world and you'll want
something exciting. They're not conventionally beautiful; sonnets are
not written about pylons. Pylons are quite mundane, they look
different in different countries, they buzz if you get too close to
them and visually they are painfully reticulated.

All this and it's got to look good enough to go on a shirt and have
someone cough up money for it.

This blog has some good before after images of logos from major
companies.

http://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/

I'd stay away from swooshes - done to death.

K

Mike Orr thinks effort should be spent on the 1.0 release, not the branding. James Gardner thinks both need sorting out and is keen to get the branding sorted out next since Pylons is already fairly stable and how we brand it will affect how we structure the code for the 1.0 release eg whether we go for the Core Pylons and the Power Pack idea which James is advocating to keep Pylons core separate from things like SQLAlchemy and AuthKit.

In an earlier discussion on the topic Todd G added:

Is this tied to any release plans or just a general initiative/plan? In other words is this for a 1.0 party (or more conservatively 0.9.6 or just a general effort to increase visibility?

I've always found the website overall to have a decent fit and finish, but a bit gloomy, like a rainy day. I wouldn't propose screaming happy yellow everywhere, but perhaps a bit less dour? It's a big can of worms though I know... but when you're learning something and banging your head on the desk, even a little cheer can help!

Edin Salkovic doesn't like the indentation of the center aligned title on the homepage.