Re: The deal with our old logo[s?] (the penguin one)

On 16 March 2017 at 09:31, Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> wrote:

On Wed, Mar 15, 2017 at 09:23:47PM -0700, Michael Lustfield wrote:
> Where can i read more about our logo's history? (at least for how long they
> were used)

https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/project-history/ch-detailed.en.html#s4.3
has some info about when the swirl logo was introduced but nothing about the
old "chicken" logo… (nobody called it the "penguin logo" - it was a chicken!)

I will try to dig out some information on the "Captain Blue eyes" (also known as 'the chicken') logo, taking a look at our mailing list archives, and add it to the project history document. Patches, of course, are most welcome.

But boy! this was really a long time ago... To answer the question of how long it was used: the first logo was selected November 1997 [0] , and its license was published in July 1998 (as per webwml source for the logo pages). I actually remember contributing a patch to linuxlogo in 1998 to include the chicken logo there. Which is this one:

linuxlogo (2.12-1) unstable; urgency=low

* New upstream release.
* Changed the "Classic" logo image to the Debian Logo. Based on ANSI art
provided by Javier Fernandez-Sanguino Pen~a .

-- Steve Kostecke Wed, 18 Nov 1998 18:46:20 -0500

The logo was used until a new one was selected via GR through a project-wide vote in May 1999.

I have dome some cursory searches through the mailing list archive and brought up some interesting messages related to the logo [2] [3] [4] [5]. My memory is not that good, but it looks like the driver for the first logo was an advertisement to be published in Linux Journal associated with the release of Hamm. Unfortunately, many pointers to URLs in emails (such as the 1st logo contest) are not available anymore and not archived in archive.org, so I might need input from people which were involved back then on the selection of the logo to complete the information.

Coincidentally, I believe there was a correlation also on the logo selection (which sparked many flame wars) and the 1st Debian Constitution (december 1998), that setup the mechanisms for GRs. See for example this message from Jay Treacy [7]. Three of the elections in 1999 [8] where related to the Debian Logo (the other one was the constitution itself and the DPL election).The constitution is not mentioned in the project history section for those years, that is an omission which should be fixed.

Best regards

Javier

[0] https://lists.debian.org/debian-publicity/1997/11/msg00014.html

[1] https://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/webwml/webwml/english/logos/index.wml?revision=1.1&view=markup

[2] https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/1998/04/msg00591.html

[3] https://lists.debian.org/debian-publicity/1998/07/msg00044.html

[5] https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/1999/04/msg00011.html

[6] https://lists.debian.org/debian-publicity/1998/01/msg00000.html

[7] https://lists.debian.org/debian-publicity/1998/04/msg00026.html

[8] https://www.debian.org/vote/1999/