Open-Sourced Logos - <AUTHOR> http://www.logodust.com/?ope <comment><USER4> They don't seem to mention it anywhere, but Inkscape is probably the best tool for opening .ai files, assuming you don't have a copy of Adobe Illustrator.

</comment><comment><USER5> The amateur game development community would love these. Designing logos for in-universe companies is a thankless chore.

But they're really adverse to using things without an explicit license. This could really use a CC0 stamp somewhere.

<comment><USER6> It does have an explicit license CC4 Attribution. So you put

Logos by XX in your credits and you're done.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wonder how easy it would be to generate more logos like these, via neural network or other means.

<comment><USER8> Neural networks might be tricky. Logos tend to be precise, neural networks work better when the result is fuzzier.

On the other hand, identifying a good logo is the sort of fuzzy problem that you might be able to train a network for. Use it as a fitness function over some other algorithm.

You could have a generator that combined a variety of operations into a 'logo expression' that generates an image.

Have values and operations in the expression to represent:

      a variety of geometric shapes.

      composite operations (union, intersection, subtraction etc.)

      symmetry operations (reflective, rotational)

      Glyph images (possibly with some sort of semantic metadata to enable relationships between multiple glyphs)

      Transformations (translatiosn, rotations etc.  Possibly just a matrix)

      Filters (smooth corners,  grow shape,  generate outline)

So you get something like

square(1.5).rotate(45).smooth(30).outline(3).translate(-0.5,0.0).rotationalSymmetry(5).subtract( circle(0.25).translate(0.5,0.5) )

Which if I got it right should be a set of 5 squares with rounded corners and a line thickness of 3 arranges in a circle and a small circle cut out of the bottom right corner of the squares.

<comment><USER8> I'll add to that the possibility of adding a layer similar to [http://www.contextfreeart.org/](http://www.contextfreeart.org/)

It occupies a somewhat similar space, (I believe it does not provide composition operations). Having the ability to define shapes as a probabilistic combination of other shapes gives you a massive variety of possibilities.

something like this would allow for a good variety of base imagery which could then have the layer I posted in the previous comment come after.

Check out the context free art gallery for some amazing (not very logo like) images

[http://www.contextfreeart.org/gallery/](http://www.contextfreeart.org/gallery/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> What's the actual license?

<comment><USER10> Creative Commons (it's at the bottom of the page).

Specifically:

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License [http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

<comment><USER9> >No additional restrictions

Does it mean that one can't trademark a logo from this site?

<comment><USER11> Copyright and trademark are independent, you could have one without the other.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Ah, another website using the Unsplash.com give-everything-away business model. Great concept! And great Unsplash photos beneath the logos :)

</comment><comment><USER13> I have been building my first personal site with links to demo toy projects and was just about to figure out the logo situation. I want to create a simple but engaging brand for myself. This rocks. Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER14> The pharmacy logo is more or less the logo of Lloyds Pharmacy in the UK. Close enough that it could be deemed to be infringing their TM IMO (it's tricky though with generic imagery).

<comment><USER15> If you're referring to this device [1], it's a matter of opinion. Personally I wouldn't really agree: the mortar and pestle is a common enough device and the leaf is a nice distinctive element.

The real risk in a situation like this is not really that you get a C&D from using it on your startup's landing page. The risk is that if you eventually tried to file a trademark for it, you would lose: either because some large firm's lawyers would oppose and have no trouble outspending you; or because, if you tried to file a trademark on an open-source logo you found on HN, you probably got bad legal advice.

If I had a natural-supplement startup, for example, I'd be fine using this open-source logo as a placeholder and developing a new logo once I wanted to start a trademark registration process.

[http://enjoykingsheath.com/wp- content/uploads/2012/02/lloyds...](http://enjoykingsheath.com/wp- content/uploads/2012/02/lloyds-pharmacy1.gif)

<comment><USER11> > The real risk in a situation like this is not really that you get a C&D from > using it on your startup's landing page.

Doesn't a trademark have to be defended if you won't face the risk to lose it? Is the C&D really so unlikely?

<comment><USER15> IP law firms use automated software to scrape the trademark registration filings at the USPTO and other national trademark offices (ex. [1]). These software services automatically assess filings for possible infrigement. This is the most likely way for a bigco's lawyers to find out about your logo or company name - far more likely than them finding out about your startup from techcrunch or some other source.

Unfortunately for me, this happened to me. I was able to negotiate a coexistence agreement for my logo, but I could have done without the pain. If I were to start over from scratch, I would seriously consider doing the Apple/Google offline foreign filing trick [2].

[1] [http://towergatesoftware.com/](http://towergatesoftware.com/)

[2] [http://blog.altlegal.com/tongan-shell-game-how-apple-and- goo...](http://blog.altlegal.com/tongan-shell-game-how-apple-and-google-file- trademarks-in-secret)

<comment><USER11> Thanks for sharing your experience. The second link was really interesting to read and the Apple/Google offline foreign filing trick was new to me.

I still don't understand how it solves the problem. After six months you will have to file at the USPTO and then the scrapers could find you anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> You, too, can have a generic logo that doesn't actually reflect your individual company, message, or values! Simply pair it with a font of your choosing (font and logo need not match), and you have yourself a brand.

These kinds of things devalue the actual work that goes into real branding, like crowdsourcing your logo or Marissa Mayer popping out something that she thinks "looks nice" over a weekend. It also has the effect that any graphic designer who can whip something up in Illustrator thinks they are a brand expert.

<comment><USER17> No. I'm bootstrapping a product startup, and the only thing I care about now is whether it works and whether people find _value_ in it. Its logo doesn't matter, the copy doesn't matter, glossy startuppy pictures don't matter. The only thing that matters now is whether it is materially useful - <USER2> someone thinks that their life is easier because this tool exist in this world.

So when this site came up a long time ago in /new, I grabbed one of it and put it on - only because my product contains a Chrome Extension, and it needs a small 32x32 icon. And, it is a damn good logo too. I also sent an email asking permission to use it, and even offering to pay (peanuts) for exclusive access, and the founder was extremely courteous and reminded me that it doesn't matter what you start with, you can always change once you get traction.

So there you go. I love my generic logo.

<comment><USER18> I can't upvote this enough.

I know a few of the true stories behind the original logos of some of SV's unicorns and this is spot on (unfortunately, I cannot share them because they were shared in confidence). The parent comment is not wrong about the value of a great brand, but it can easily become a huge frivolous distraction after a certain point when you're should be focusing on building something useful for people in their daily lives. You can always perform a full brand refresh later once you can afford to spend a few months and lots of money to do so, and that's exactly what many unicorns eventually do.

I've seen outside designers rationalize some of these well known brands after the fact without knowing the inside and often accidental story and its comical. It's brand design. Like all the other components of a great company and great product, it's contributory like engineering and customer service, but it's not like you're solving World peace. For some products/services and target markets, the brand may be very important. For others, it could be non- consequential. "Worse is better" and "perfect is the enemy of done" apply to brand design as much as in any other aspect. Like other aspects you can always iterate and improve later.

<comment><USER19> Totally. I think there is plenty of value in design and brand work. The types of startups that don't have the money, or need to get a professional designer to help them out aren't the types of customer any designer would want in the first place. So free resources like these simply fill the gap to make sure startups don't waste $5 on fiverr for crap, instead get something much nicer for free. WHen they have the money and are seeing their company get traction, their brand becomes important and they'll naturally shift towards designers. I think the company behind this resource understands that. bravo.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Thanks for this! These could be really useful for folks creating design templates. There's tons of stock photos, icons, videos, etc available, but not a lot of logos.

I don't see any information about a license, though? This article might be helpful:

[https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/Marking_your_work_with...](https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/Marking_your_work_with_a_CC_license)

</comment><comment><USER21> I like this, but I'm trying to understand the consequences of more than one person using the same one. I think the answer is, nothing until two or more users start to clash. At which point it will come down to who trademarked it first. That sounds reasonable, since you are probably dealing with small use cases wouldn't bother trademarking such a thing. They would get their own unique one first.

One the other hand, I suppose a new type of "trademark troll" could hypothetically arise from paying to trademark these, and then suing you for using them. Although I would like to think that a reasonable defense in court would be, "look I just got it for free from this site, and I willing to stop using it". ... and on the third hand, we see actual out of court settlements for patents that have less to stand on than that.

So I guess it's more of a "who gives a damn", and "quit worrying so much" thing.

</comment><comment><USER22> This is great! I played around with mixing a couple of them into a possible logo for my snail simulation: [http://i.imgur.com/hRkCw2q.png](http://i.imgur.com/hRkCw2q.png)

</comment><comment><USER23> Here's a nice classic logo:

[http://donhopkins.com/home/archive/lisp/llogo.lisp](http://donhopkins.com/home/archive/lisp/llogo.lisp)

</comment><comment><USER24> 1) I really like this! 2) How to make it better: Design your own quick-and- dirty logo. 2a) Upload a photo. 2b) Apply a filter. 2c) Overlay a simple icon. 2d) Bonus: combine filter and icon to create a favicon!

</comment><comment><USER25> #16 is gold. Using that on my next project.

</comment><comment><USER26> How to open it in an open sourced way? GIMP?

<comment><USER27> Inkscape ( [https://inkscape.org/](https://inkscape.org/) ). Runs on Win/Mac/Linux and OSS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I am using this since I've seen it on ProductHunt. Pretty good stuff.

</comment><comment><USER29> Awesome - <USER3>

</comment><comment><USER30> I swear I thought I read "Open Sources LEGOs" and I was super pumped up.

<comment><USER31> I read "open sourced logs" for some reason. I was confused by what that could mean. I clicked, and felt even more confused.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> These logos aren't good. A logo should have some degree of symmetry, simple enough to draw, original, and not readily resembling something in real life or a prior logo.

this is an umbrella plus tear drop: [http://www.logodust.com/img/logo18.png](http://www.logodust.com/img/logo18.png)

paperclip [http://www.logodust.com/img/logo20.png](http://www.logodust.com/img/logo20.png)

too complicated to be effective:

[http://www.logodust.com/img/logo9.png](http://www.logodust.com/img/logo9.png)

ripoff of star trek and anarchy circle

[http://www.logodust.com/img/logo2.png](http://www.logodust.com/img/logo2.png)

this was the only good one [http://www.logodust.com/img/logo1.png](http://www.logodust.com/img/logo1.png)

<comment><USER33> > A logo should ...

Why?

<comment><USER34> Let me un-ellipses the quote so we can make some sense of things.

> A logo should (...) have some degree of symmetry, simple enough to draw, > original, and not readily resembling something in real life or a prior logo.

Symmetry is valued by us humans as a positive aesthetic.

Simplicity aids in recall.

Originality aids in brand recognition.

Those are _some_ whys.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> They're all just geometric shapes that anyone could throw together. Really, you're pretty damn lazy or uninspired if you can't put together a stop sign outline with 2 circles on either side of it!

<comment><USER36> Do you realize how many company logos are just the Helvetica font? You can't get any more basic than that. When you're just getting started, especially a one man operation, anything to get your product up and running quicker is a good thing.

Here's a few "no name" companies.

[http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2009/03/40-excellent- logos-c...](http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2009/03/40-excellent-logos- created-with-helvetica/)

<comment><USER35> Yes, but thought, money, and man hours went into them. They didn't just grab rejected logos from the "commodity" bin, which is what we have here. Seriously, if you can't put some design effort into your logo then something's wrong.</comment></comment></comment>


Recursion to Iteration, Part 4: The Trampoline - <AUTHOR> http://blog.moertel.com/posts/2013-06-12-recursion-to-iteration-4-trampolines.html

<comment><USER2> There's some kind of underlying, overwhelming point in there...

That tail call elimination, agressive inlining, escape analysis, continuation passing style, are saying a lot about the boundary between blocks in Algol- style languages, on one hand, and functions in LISP and ML derivatives, on the other hand.

I've seen someone in a Quora thread state that monads are just like semicolon - newline, which, beyond the witticism, says that (most) monads do sequential code, which is the point of blocks (defined by statements separated by semicolons, and semantically executed sequentially, and to make that block an atomic... Thing)

Now yeah. Where am I getting to?

I'm not sure.

The point for functional programming is composability, which is obtained in many philosophically and technically different ways, but since those distinctions, naively implemented, make call stacks explode and garbage collectors cry in agony.

TCO aims to find functions that can be seen as a block of statements that set n different variables, block which is then iterated a set number of times with different values of those variables

Escape analysis aims to find functions that take an argument A and return a value R where R can be substituted for A in the caller's, uh, memory. Such a function is equivalent to a block that simply sets a variable that is in scope.

(state-ish) monads aim to allow the sequential and atomic execution of functions that are related in a way that's hard to fit into the "pipes" model, typically by passing around a data structure representing the state those functions "live in". That data structure is roughly equivalent to the scope in block-structure languages.

CPS means, more or less, that the stack is a great way to deal with tree-like expression evaluations, but that some control flow is hard to fit in a tree, or that it's a waste of tree space to do so.

It seems like a lot of those techniques' goal is to offer, at the same time, the composability of functions, and the performance of blocks.</comment>


Make a giant tweet - <AUTHOR> http://gianttweet.com/

<comment><USER2> If you're looking for something to just make any text show up really large in your browser try <http://nirmalpatel.com/largetype/> I made it because I wanted something like QuickSilver's Large Type feature but accessible when I'm not using QuickSilver.</comment>


Ask HN: What technological trends will emerge and rule in next 10 years?  - <AUTHOR> We have seen the sudden emergence of driverless car,  IOT, 3d printers, machine learning etc. What according to you,  which technology will shape our ecosystem <comment><USER2> Hardware : much better batteries, much lower power processors, devices that are just like plates of glass, featureless and see through. Personal mobility devices ( electric skateboards ), exoskeletons for manual work. Robotic helpers in next decade ? Prototype humanoid bipedal autonomous, not widespread at all. Wifi tattoo inks that luminesce / buzz as a notification, people get them on their forearms and elsewhere.

Networking / computing : all about massively parallel low power 1 million server WANs.

Medicine : Theranos style testing is everywhere. Some genetic modifications available for embryos. CRISPR/ vector gene therapies becomes mainstream for > 200 conditions, tho they are not generally effective across the population. Cystic fibrosis cured. Wild-west labs experiment with genetic reversible "enhancements", like broader-spectrum vision, increased ceberal blood flow, overexpression of metabolic enzymes in brain. Initial human trials of therapies to temporarily reverse age related cellular damage.

Software : far more personalization of content and algorithms, micropayment ecosystem for the web, non-generally-intelligent AI will be our main interaction ( instead of searching ).

</comment><comment><USER3> sharing economy, virtual reality based solutions, widespread native language support on human facing interfaces, cloud storage, applications entirely based on cloud ecosystem, 3d printing aiding fashion exploration rapidly,</comment>