How Famous OS Logos Got Started 103
Shane O'Neill writes "Ronald McDonald and the NBC Peacock may get more TV air time, but today's operating systems have cool logos, too. Google, Apple, Microsoft and the Linux crowd crafted mascots ranging from cute lizards to circles of life. In this slideshow, we look at the origins of the logos and look ahead to their future."
Woefully incomplete (Score:5, Interesting)
What about Amiga? Commodore? The Mac 'smile'? MS-DOS?
The article's pretty scant on details even for the logos they did describe. Commodore might not be around any more, but their logo remains iconic.
I'm confused ... (Score:5, Interesting)
All this time I thought these [blogspot.com] were the right logos.
Re:Woefully incomplete (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Well, I made it one slide (Score:3, Interesting)
Depends on which version of primary colors you use. For computer displays, they are : red, green, and blue. For art (painting), they are : red, yellow, and blue. So you could say all are primary colors.
Re:Woefully incomplete (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Red Hat logo (Score:1, Interesting)
I'd always thought the Red Hat was a reference to De Bono's "Six Thinking Hats" [wikipedia.org]. The IT industry also talks about "black hats" (hackers, appropriately enough the black thinking hat is "judgement"/"identifying flaws") and "white hats" (security folk, although the white thinking hat is actually "neutrality" rather than "vigilantism" or whatever, I assume it's intended as the polar opposite of a "black hat").
PS. Why is the idle section so screwed up? The comment box is narrower than it is tall (and it's only 10 lines tall).
Re:Well, I made it one slide (Score:5, Interesting)
Red, green and blue are the "additive" primary colours--the three primary components to making any colour with sources of light (computer displays and televisions generally emit light, hence the use of the RGB colour model for video media). You got that one right.
However two of the primary colours "for art" yo9u mentioned aren't technically correct (but they have an historical basis). The "subtractive" primary colours are magenta, yellow and cyan. This is where you get the "CMYK" cartriges for your printers. The K is for blacK (I guess it isn't called CMYB because blue already took the letter B...).
The additive and subtractive primary colours have complementary characteristics. If you combine the light from each of the additive primaries you get white. If you combine pigment of each of the subtractive primaries you get black. The subtractive and additive primaries are each exact complementary colours of each other (the complement of one primary is the combination of the other two primaries), hence:
Red -> complement is green plus blue = Cyan
Green -> complement is red plus blue = Magenta
Blue -> complement is red plus green = Yellow
That is how we get the acronyms for the primary colours: RGB is ordered by wavelength and CMY represents the complement of RGB.
Anyways, science hadn't established modern colour theory before much of the work done by renaissance painters was completed--colour theory of that time was based upon observation and aesthetics. They saw rainbows, came up with colour wheels, saw how their pigments blended and such and came up with their own set of primary colours. In this case they divided the colour wheel into FOUR parts and picked four primary colours such that each primary had another primary as a complement (it was all about subtractive colour theory too--they didn't know much about the additive primaries of light to have the six primaries we have now). Those colours are roughly RED, YELLOW, GREEN and BLUE (picked as they are the most prominent in rainbow spectrums observed in nature).
The colours of the Microsoft Windows logo are the four "renaissance painter's primaries". Each pair complements the other and are both bold and pleasing to the eye. The poster ianare is basically right, all four colours are pri,aries in one sense or another, though the details weren't quite complete.
Re:Woefully incomplete (Score:3, Interesting)
Yep, and they also miss out the BSD Daemon [wikipedia.org], and Hexley the Platypus [hexley.com] - which beat the corporate Windows and OS X logos any day. And lacking BSD, they miss the story of the two Texans reacting to the BSD daemon T-shirt [milk.com], one of the best stories in BSD history.