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So, apparently the Wikimedia foundation has deployed their new logo for Wikipedia. And I must say it looks horrible. While I am pleased that they’ve selected new characters for all the other pieces of the puzzle, and they’ve cleaned up those minor problems with the Devanagari and Japanese characters, overall the new logo is a total aesthetic failure.
It is too small. Why did they decrease the size of the logo? Is there a reason for this, or was it just done arbitrarily? I think the original size was just right, and in the new size the characters are just too small.
The anti-aliasing is crap. There is not enough contrast between the characters and the piece background. The characters should be black on a light gray background, not darkish medium gray on a lightish medium gray background.
The “shadow” of the back is too dark. It is very distracting in the new logo and makes it look almost like there is a small black piece on the front of the puzzle sphere. In the original logo, the shadow is a muted gray and doesn’t distract from the rest of the logo other than to enhance the sense of three-dimensionality.
Finally, and by far most importantly, the sense of texture from the engraved edges of the pieces, making it look it was constructed from actual puzzle pieces, is completely lost. Now it just looks like someone drew the idea of a puzzle onto a smooth sphere. The the three-dimensionality of the pieces in the old logo gave the logo a very satisfying sense of texture. I spent many hours getting the lighting and texture to look just right on the original logo, and in the new logo, it doesn’t appear anyone considered the aesthetics at all, and instead just focused on the “cool” factor of making the logo a “real” 3-D model and the “PC” factor of changing the character errors and selecting new characters for the hidden pieces.
Overall, the new logo is a total flop. I hope they revert back to the old logo until these major flaws can be addressed.
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