Road to Small Basic Online: Blog #1 - Exploring New Logos

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07/29/2016

This is part 1 in a blog series that takes us down the road toward Small Basic Online!

Road to Small Basic Online Blog #1 – Exploring New Logos - This blog!
Road to Small Basic Online Blog #2 – New Mascot

In the Small Basic team, we have a great designer, Ram, who is helping us explore new logos.

Please keep in mind that these logos are currently being used for internal Microsoft projects. We aren't finished yet.

That said/written, we welcome your feedback! Please leave a comment below!

Here is our current logo:

Our Small Basic Community Council member, Liam, had a fantastic futuristic version that modernizes the ideogram/symbol:

Small Basic carries on the Logo turtle graphics tradition, and so we wanted to combine that into our new logo (by featuring a turtle shell ideogram). But I have to say that I was very passionate about the previous "stepping stones" / "building blocks" motif that Vijay originally had. However, as the logo simplified, the building blocks began to look like a diamond-style hexagon (a flat shape). That's how I originally interpreted them... as gems.

Our first version of the turtle-shell-style ideogram centered on four colors, to map into the Microsoft windows ideogram:

Our artist, Ram, went with a crayon-style text for "Small Basic" to show it's a fun language, also done in the Microsoft logo red.We liked that version, but we wanted to see one that felt more like a turtle shell pattern and a little less like a classic light and sound game that rhymes with pie-man. =^)

The next version focused on the blue and green colors (since red and yellow was in the text and line on the right):

The line was added as the slogan "Kids Can Code" was added below it. It's true, Small Basic is also for teens, adults, and anyone who wants to learn one of the most complicated things on our planet (syntax-based coding) in the simplest and most fun and social environment that currently exists... Small Basic! I, for one, would have preferred to have learned on Small Basic when I was in college. However, at the same time, the biggest need for such a simple way to learn text-based programming (did we mention that Small Basic is extendable to hardware like Arduino, Oculus Rift, Raspberry Pi, and Kinect, as well as 3D graphics and physics for games?)... is currently for students after they learn block-based conceptual programming and before they learn programming languages built by adults for adults (like Java, Python, Ruby, and C#). Thus, "Kids Can Code". But we think adults will see it simply as "Programming for Dummies." If it's built for kids... then they can learn it too!

The next experiment was to see how it looked with the original logo's building-block pastel colors:

That was a little bright and cheerful. =^)

Next we looked at some mixes of the Microsoft colors again. Here the emphasis is on red and yellow:

And here the emphasis is on red and green:

And this one focuses on green and blue:

And this one focuses on yellow and blue:

And next it was up for something a bit different. This one pushes more back to the Microsoft logo's ideogram/symbol:

That one looks a little bit target-like, and we wanted the turtle aspect. Here is a version of that, with the "SB" in white:

And here it is with the "SB" in black (and borders in white):

And that leads us to where we're currently at! We found the white borders in the shell to give it a nice feeling of negative space. Regardless of where the final logo lands, we're getting some great use out of it at Microsoft! Special thanks go out to Ram.

Please leave a comment with your thoughts!

Small and Basically yours,

- Ninja Ed

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Road to Small Basic Online: Blog #1 - Exploring New Logos

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