Infamy
Finally, my great work is on display for the world (well, LinuxTAGers anyway) to see!
To be honest, I feel a little ambivalent towards the design: Its too busy, uses too many colours, doesn’t scale down to low resolutions. And, at the end of the day, it doesn’t really communicate what OSM is all about.
The problem with trying to represent the idea or concept of a free global street map is that the two main themes, “free” and “map”, are inherently difficult to explain visually. The visual language icons is surprisingly complex, but at the end of the day reduces to pictography – i.e: you draw simplified versions of what you see. For example, the Chinese character “人”, meaning man, does look something like a man. (see more and the evolution of the character at the Wikipedia page).
See also the 50 ideograms of the AIGA symbol signs. Of those, only five don’t in some way represent pictures of what they mean: First Aid, Information, Parking, No Entry and Exit.
So the concept of “free”, being an abstract noun, is quite hard to picture. The meanings, both intended, of gratis and freedom are in themselves hard to draw. How do you show “no money”? Freedom is even harder – it represents a lack of barriers and restrictions. Typically, when designers need to include some icon of freedom they’ll turn to cultural artefacts, such as flying doves, the statue of liberty, national flags, which don’t translate well internationally. One of the better known, and very well-designed, logos is the Amnesty International logo, but sadly I can’t crib this as the logo itself has little to do with freedom 
A map is also very difficult, because the map itself is a representation of reality. So the icon would be a representation of a representation of reality. Clearly, its easy to lose the message along the way! We couldn’t use map symbols, as these vary from country to country. I’m sure if the OS hasn’t copyrighted them yet then it soon would. The quintessence of “map” is very hard to pin down – clearly an aerial photograph doesn’t have “map-nature”, but LandRangerâ„¢ does and so does the Tube Map. It seems to me that “map-nature” is as abstract as freedom, even though a map might be a physical object.
To conclude: I’m not particularly happy with my design for the OSM logo, but I don’t have any better ideas… Maybe someone else will?
1 comment May 10th, 2006