I guess we should discuss this.

Please note I've been working on this off and on in the background and, while I think it's now closer, I wouldn't say it is "ready" yet. Currently I am in the process of re-kerning things so that the logo will scale to 64x64, 128x128 and 256x256, which should finally result in a (mostly*) single source SVG that will work for the about logo, splash screen, wiki logo, midas logo, and icons. It's not done yet, though.

(* For complicated, technical reasons, it is impossible for the 'wire box' to kern properly and also scale, so this needs to be done separately for each resolution. Fortunately that is much easier than kerning the whole logo multiple times.)

That said, I'd like to retain the history anyway, and it would probably be okay to use just the new about / splash logos in their current form, though note that the Welcome module and application icons will still be using the old version in such case.

I like the idea of improving the look of the logos and the splash screens.

One thing I don't really like is the subtle distortion of the logo which you can see more easily if you look at them side by side. The one on the left is a little egg shaped and has some other odd details like the perspective looks wrong (look at the arc of the top layer going from front to back on the top of the sphere for example). And there is different shading etc.

https://github.com/mwoehlke-kitware/Slicer/commit/e110580e31324ec0cea371da0871d959fadd072c

https://github.com/mwoehlke-kitware/Slicer/commit/0e4103f78df60f62f6bef5438fa8062c62dc2df4

An easier thing might be to just use the version of the logo we use in the BarCamp:

https://plus.google.com/communities/105715968666294296532

Or use a new logo that doesn't try to be an exact copy of the existing one.

As an aside it's always bugged me that the logo says "3DSlicer" and not "3D Slicer" so that would be good to fix to IMO.

I don't have a source form of the full shading (it looks like it was done purely as raster graphics; there are subtle effects in the original version that don't appear to make sense from a strictly geometric standpoint, and the high resolution versions show upsampling artifacts) and had to reproduce it as best I could. I'm actually pretty happy with the end result which consists entirely of linear and conical gradients.

The "distortion" has similar points; I'm fairly confident that the original version either a) is an inaccurate projection, b) is not a sphere, c) uses non-ortohgonal slicing planes, or d) some combination of the above. The new version is demonstrably geometrically correct; the shape reference comes from a 3D rendering (see slicer-logo.py).

The BarCamp version appears to be the existing SVG, which has very simple shading and (like all of the existing versions) very poor kerning.

I'm not arguing that the current one is perfect, just that "it is the current one". So trying to make a fixed version is going to look wrong even if it is "right" according to you.

That's why I suggest you not try to replicate the current one exactly, but rather introduce a new one that is obviously based on the old one, but new and fresh. This is what I like about the BarCamp one - the cropping makes it something new but it's obviously the slicer logo.

I like the idea of generating something that is geometrically correct. I don't know if Wendy originally made the logo this way for artistic reasons (she was a trained artist, by the way) but like it or not what she created is the current standard and the improvements you make will look funny to people.

Also note that we dropped some of the thin lines from the google+ and mac logos, which also makes it scale better and is arguably cleaner.

And if I didn't say it thank you for doing this by the way. I think cleaned up image files will make things easier in a lot of ways.

I like the improved clarity in the updated logo, but the spherical shape and vertical cutting plane intersection lines look more elegant in the current version.