A Horse Designed By an Open-Source Committee

I have only three things to say about the heroic efforts of Mark Boulton to come up with a design for a Drupal wordmark that will satisfy the entire Drupal community.

First: Mark is a brave man.

Second: I hereby officially delegate my opinion on the Drupal wordmark to Mark, Dries Buytaert, Barry Jaspan, and Angie Byron. If they like it, I like it, by definition. My desire to further influence the decision is more than trumped by my belief that such artistic decisions can’t be made by a giant, public committee.

Finally: Voting. Draw up three strong contenders, then let the community respond to a questionnaire. Don’t request too much free-form feedback in open forums during your design process. You will go stark raving mad.

The firm that recently redesigned my alma mater’s logo did a great job with this: The first I heard of the project was when I received an email link to an online questionnaire. The questionnaire took ten or twenty minutes to complete, featured three variations of the logo, and asked all sorts of fuzzy questions — I can’t remember any of them, but they were something like “does this logo express the intellectual qualities you associate with the university.” Or whatever. In retrospect, it didn’t really matter what the questions were — the important thing was that they asked a sufficient number of important-sounding questions to convince me that I was participating in a thorough, serious decision-making process.

Then, a few months later, the university announced the winner, and, lo! I was happy. Because, hey, the new logo looks pretty good! And because I had been asked.