11-02-11
The demonetize logo
As you can see, we started with a project logo, which is a »coin« (not any specific one) with is crossed out by a red »x« to signal: Let’s get rid of money. On a friendly mailinglist (the commoning-list) we got some feedback saying:
- the logo is not clear enough concerning different intercultural readings
- the coin is not clearly identifiable as such
- the red »x« could be read as an approval (like in votings)
There have been some proposal to solve this ambiguity:
- use of a pile of coins replacing the single coin
- use of a »let’s get rid of«-logo like in this post
- use of a generic currency symbol (however, the currency sign seems to be too abstract)
- use of the word »NO« instead of the red »x«
- find a new logo
Do you have some more ideas or proposals or sketches? Please leave a comment!
[Update] Here are two new drafts using a pile of coins:
(smaller cross)
(thicker cross)
This is the final new logo (please use this instead of the old one above with the single coin):
From: demonetize.it
ah, thanks,
generally speaking, it seems difficult to say NO in a motto or with a symbol – yet I am pretty sure you past the phase of trying out various positive-message-versions?
maybe there is a path, still, let’s try – even given the de-…. name of this site that also includes a negative – could it just be funny image that is easy to recognize and that has no “meaning” other than adding a bit of colour and serving as a favicon?
e.g., by way of just playing around: could the “it” be turned upside down?
Yes, maybe some playing could help, however, I am not a graphical designer to transform ideas to images easily. Finally, I could only combine existing elements and modify them a bit. That’s my limitation….
What about paper money burning? I thought the message was clear when I saw the image for this article: http://www.realitysandwich.com/money_and_crisis_civilization
@russell: would be a clear message yet more provocative than a “neutral” coin with a cross…
@claudia: positive message: would be good, yet difficult, also because of the heterogeneity of the demonetization-debate. maybe “conscious economy”, but how to symbolize this?
I like the new logo proposal with the pile of coins! Both variants look good the me, but the second variant with the thicker cross may be more suitable for scaling down (in order to produce the tiny favicon).
Hi,
I agree with Claudia – although difficult, a non-negative logo would be great!
Maybe something symbolizing flow (not exchange, but the flow of things (of course not “goods”), but life-sustaining things, call it chi (not wanting to drift into esoteric grounds here) or whatever)
or maybe something growing out of a coin or of a money bill to symbolize transgression, transformation, similar to the barcode morphing into grass and flowers in one of the zeitgeist logos (sadly i can´t show it to you here …)
… this is really difficult, beacuse everything is so much loaded with associations…
i actually like the coin logo. it is simple and yellow… but the problem with the coin logo is – that i see coins, i.e. money, and not no money. what i associate is… money, not no money. (wasn´t it shown that the parts of human brain do not know negation, so that you actually reinforce statements instead of their opposite by negating them?)
one more association coming along with my previois posting:
growing out of money…. out-growing money…
If you click on my name, you come to the website where you can see the barcode logo that i referred to in the previous post.
oh – my new posting got lost? basically i wanted to say:
growing out of money… out-growing money…
@Niko: Yes, a non-negative logo would be great, but »demonetize« itself is negative. This one of the major problems of overcoming the current system: How to find positive notions which make clear, that they are at the same time overcome old notions (even »growing out of« is negative…). I find this nearly impossible without using many, many words (like the Zeitgeist film does).
In the meantime I will change the logo to the pile-styled one, but this does not mean that die debate on the logo os closed. New proposals are welcome 🙂
is “growing out of” negative?
»Growing out of« is negative in the sense, that you need something to overcome, to grow-out, to make invalid, to replace etc. The definition of the new depend on the negation of the old. I think we cannot avoid this at the step where we are. If we are able to determine the new by itself, then we have it.
hi stefan: the new logo still does not come up with facebook (fb still uses automatically the old version)
Where in Facebook? Do you have a link?
see http://www.facebook.com/#!/andreas.exner
@Andreas: This is pretty weird. Facebook uses an external service (an external site, but owned by facebook: fbcdn.net), which seem to have digged for a logo in a bigger size and found the one of this article. Then they used it for the whole site. Wow, there must be clever algorithm behind that (if not done manually).
fbcdn.net seems to act as a proxy for static content. I don’t know how to change the cached content. I can try to change the graphics used in this article here, especially the filenames of the images, which indicate that they are »the logo«.
OK, now I replaced the old logo on the filename demonetize.png with the new logo, and inserted the old logo under a new filename, which hopefully is no longer recognized as logo. And I added the new logo on the page About.
If you constantly see the old logo instead of the new: Please reload the page or reload the logo itself (right click, show image, then reload the single image).