Robigalia’s Official Logo

Robigalia has been without a logo for over a year. It’s been in the back of my mind that any self-respecting open source project needs a logo. I took some design classes in high school and don’t have a budget, so I made one myself!

Here’s the end result:

I had some requirements when designing the logo. First, it should be simple enough that it looks good as a favicon (smaller than 64x64). It should also look good in monochrome or in restricted color palettes. The simpler, the better.

When I was brainstorming ideas for the logo, I got hung up trying to incorporate the idea of wheat, crop disease, agriculture, or Roman themes, owing to the project’s name. Eventually I remembered about the Elian script. I started doodling various words in Elian. A full word was too complicated. I focused on a particular cluster of letters that fit together well: "rbg". This is also a shorthand for "Robigalia", which works out well!

What you see above is an SVG (created in Inkscape) inspired those three letters in the Elian script. For symmetry, the actual letters are "rbp", but it doesn’t bother me to not directly use the Elian script. The lines and the whitespace between them are all the same width, which helps the SVG scale down to small resolutions well. The cyan color on the dark background reminds me of Tron. I also think it kinda looks like a sideways 8-bit jellyfish. eternaleye said it looks like a push button schematic.

I think it’s kinda neat, and look forward to seeing some awesome desktop themes using it once we have a windowing system!