Saturday, July 7, 2007

JAVA LOGO

In the first week of this semester, we did discussion about logo in Maddy's class. This was such an interesting class because of Maddy's talent of presentation. She gave us lots of examples about logo ranging from Apple logo, Bitis logo, etc. Through these examples, she has given to me a quite clear concept on logo design such as what the meaning of a logo is, how a logo affects the company's image and how to design a logo based on the client's request and so on.

This semester, I did enrol to Java class. When accessing the Java website in order to download Java application software for my computer, I got a strong impression on Java logo. It is a representation of a cup of tea or coffee with a 2-line smoke coming out from the cup. Just like any other logo, the colors of this logo are based simple ones, red and blue in this case. The logo was placed nicely in the top left of the website.

Wow, this was such an impressive logo made up by smooth curved lines. I really like it. However, it couldn't really make sense for me; I was wondering why the designer design such a logo as a representation or symbol for such a programming language; hey you did a discussion about logo in Maddy's class, why don't you try to analyse this one to have a clearer image?_ I replied myself ^o^.

Before analysing the logo's meaning and its design composition, let's take a look at the logo.


(source "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Java_Logo.svg")


First, let's talk about the shape of the logo itself; it is an image of a cup on a saucer with steam on the top. One interesting thing of design is that the image is made up of simple curved lines ( 8 lines in total, 6 lines for the cup and the saucer and 2 for the steam).

About color, it is made up of 2 main colors (red and blue) which are 2 primary colors in design. By using these two colors, it can be placed nicely on different colored backgroud but still keeps a nice contrast... Hey, let's look at the steam, it should be white in reality, why ... red ? Uhmm maybe it is not only a steam coming out a cup, it's acttualy a fire :D Wow it really look like a fire now. I can now see one interesting point here the cup make you think the 2-line steam as a steam but the color of the steam tells you that it's a fire; or in other words, the cup anchors the meaning of the 2-line symbol as a steam while the color of the symbol anchors the meaning of the symbol as a fire, so interesting. It reminds me about lessons on representation, signifier and signified and the respond assignment of using words to anchor the meaning of an image which may have many of different meaning when standing alone in DIM 1.

Fire is a symbol of power, heat, energy, strength, danger etc. Based on this association of meaning, it shows out a sense of the power of this programming language, Java. Indeed, Java is a strong language in computing, especically on Web environment. By writting a program in Java, you can get it run on almost computing systems. I'm not going so far to technical of Java... but by using a "steam of fire", the designer has transfered to us the power of the Java language. In addition, the fire is light red which signifies joy, passion means that you as a programmer or user can find joy with apps written in this language.

About typography, there is only one word Java (the TM on above is not important, just don't care of it :P). The designer uses sans-serif rather than serif font for this word. The reason for this is that the Java logo will mostly appear on a computer screen, san-serif font could result in less flickering effect than serif-font. For PDA devices, the logo may even be very small at a top-left or lower-right of screen, we cannot recognize the word Java if it's serif font in such stituation.

Note: This anylasis of Java logo is based on my own observation of the logo as well as my emotion, impression and knowledge of the Java language so far ^^; so it may not be 100% correct and even wrong to other people's ideas. I hope getting you comments to share your opinion about the Java logo. ^^

No comments: