Comments/Ratings for a Single Item

I like the old logo. And I think it is a bad idea to completely change a logo. It is our trade mark. Modernizing it is OK, but I think it should recognizably stay the same, i.e. a white & yellow chess board, with the text Chess Variant Pages in the squares, and some piece pictograms around it (perhaps the 'Utrecht' chess font is indeed a bit dated). I don't like monochrome logos. I think they look boring and sad.

I somewhat agree with Mr. Muller that the logo shouldn't change all that much. I think the Google approach works best here. Their logos have changed, but it became a more minimalist design. Minimalism seems to be the going trend with logos. So, something along those lines is best in my opinion. I'd even recommend that the logo for play.chessvariants.org be changed. It looks a bit too kiddy I think. Designs should be simple and convey the point of the 'brand' and no more. Simple and clean also makes a better impression on people.

Google has a good logo, and I like the minimalist approach. However, the current logo is very busy rather than minimalist. It includes a chess board area, pieces in three different colors, and the name of the site spelled out on four lines. Google has the advantage of having to style only a single word, allowing them to make that one word stark and prominent. This site's title has four words. It could possibly be reduced to two words, Chess Variants. I would like the logo to visually suggest the idea of Chess variants, but lining up the letters of these two words on a checkered area does not work very well, because they have different lengths. Getting rid of the checkered area lets me align these two words with each other, using proportional fonts to make them the same width. Without using a chess board area, the main way left to visually convey the idea of Chess variants is to use pieces or some kind of Chess or Chess variant related art. Although the pieces can be easily seen in the large version of the current logo, they cannot be easily seen in the small version of the logo that appears at the top of almost every page, and many might not even be recognizable as pieces for a game like Chess. Several are animals, a couple are artillery, and one is just a circle. Larger, more recognizable pieces could work better in a small version of the logo, and this would entail using fewer of them. Another option is artwork. In my recent draft, I used a Tenniel image of Alice picking up an anthropomorphized Chess King. This is a piece commonly used in Chess and its variants, and its anthropomophized nature suggests something different than just another site on Chess. It also echoes the influence of Carroll's works on several Chess variants by V. R. Parton.

I do agree with some of the points you raise in connection with the old logo. But I think part of the problem is that 'Utrecht' is a rather outlandish chess font. So even the depicted King is not really recognizable as a King by someone not already acquanted with the font. Most of this would be solved by using a more common Chess font, and make sure King, Rook, Knight and perhaps Bishop are amongst the displayed pieces. Elephant, Camel, Cannon could be used to emphasize the 'variant' aspect. Images that are familiar won't need to be so big to be recognized. Utrecht is also lacking in that respect: drawing an entire animal needs high resolution, as most mammals look pretty much the same, with a body, legs and a neck. A close up of the head is much more recognizable.

"The Chess Variant Pages" is 20 letters. A 8x4 board section (instead of 11x4) would have 32 squares, so 12 extra, which should be able to accomodate 7 piece pictograms + 5 empty squares. That allows the squares to be drawn 37% larger, for a logo of the same width.

I don't like the Alice-based logo much. I wouldn't associate the image with chess, and certainly not with variant chess.

BTW, I am not a native Englis speaker, so I might be wrong about this, but I always thought there should be a hyphen between Chess and Variants in our name.

Regarding the hyphenation, I don't think "Chess Variant" in "The Chess Variant Pages" should be hyphenated, although I must admit I'm not 100% certain.  English has a million tricky grammar nuances, (many of which are now frequently ignored), and it shows a strong grasp of English to even raise the question of hypenating it.

You do hypenate a multi-word adjective - with multi-word being an example :)  But in The Chess Variant Pages, I don't think "chess variant" is technically and adjective that modifies pages, but is simply part of the four-word-long proper noun.

Regarding the logo, I do like the general feel of the old logo, although I've been looking at it so long I might be biased.  It does look a little old-fashioned (and I suddenly can't stop myself from using hyphenated adjectives) but frankly the whole website has a retro look, which I actually like.  Most of the new websites are formatted in a similar way (that I would have a hard time describing) but while it's trendy and "clever" now, their sliding, shifting style makes them less like actual "pages" and are not appealing to me.  Since I can't really describe it, I'll give one random example of a website that I consider both ultra-modern and ultra-crappy: https://iota.org/

I completely agree with H. G., though, that the Chess Utrecht font is not good and at least that aspect of it should change.  That said, I don't dislike Fergus's new logo although I don't think the average person who stumbled onto this site would associate it with Chess.  The way the "variants" is drawn like a shadow of "chess" is definitely a nice touch though.

The reason I thought a hyphen was needed is that they are pages about chess variants, rather than variant pages about chess. And that associativity of adjectives and nouns by default is right to left. "Red rule book" would mean a rule book that is red, not a book about red rules. (Unlike adverbs, which automatically associate with the adjective, such as "extremely large page" means a page that is extremely large, because a 'large page' can be 'extreme', but cannot be 'extremely'.)

Here are a couple more drafts.

I think if you put a subtle color on the unicorn, I like the top one better, because it's a fairy piece, so you have the classic independent shogi on the left plus a more modern idea on the right side.

The recent comments regarding hyphenation of words and English Grammar are interesting.  I think these days there is scope for some subjectivity in the use of Grammar and Punctuation and I have in fact used some subjectivity in my pages here, e.g. my page and game of TigerChess is one word.....also in my first name(s) of Shaye-Alexander the hyphen does not actually denote only a single joined name but two possible stand-alone first names as well.  In this comment I have deliberately used subjective punctuation and so forth.  However, I think the term Chess Variants is best put as two seperate words for a Site Heading and used with capitals, though the capitals may not always be "correct" when writing about.  An alternative might be Chess-variants (capital C, small v) to emphasize that Chess is the primary noun of a joint description, if this is required - but 100% theoretically correct written English would require the attention of a Professor or expert in such, I would think.

Regarding changing the logo, of the Alice Chess logo idea and Fergus' latest two design ideas, Fergus' one with the Vao appeals to me most. It might even be a better idea to use an even brighter colour or two in any new logo, particularly the bright orange of the current logo for CVP.

Regarding hypenating the name, maybe it's just me, but I'd thought it was an easy call not to use a hyphen (though I cannot explain why, somehow I just know it).

I'd add that I kind of hope that there'll be no change to the existing web address for CVP, or whatever it may be called, if a new logo and name is used..

Well, "chess variants" would definitely be two separate words, when used on their own in a sentence like "we were playing chess variants" or "chess variants are great". It is just that when used in a longer combination they sometimes need a hypen to prevent being uncoupled. Compare "big chess variant" to "big-chess variant".

Some more drafts:

Since we don't normally hyphenate the term Chess Variant, and since the URL does not include a hyphen, I would avoid adding one.

To H.G.M.

Yes, it all depends, Chess-variant (capital C small v) might be used as in Chess-variant pages, this looks neat, I think, when the subject is used in writing about, but may not be striking enough as a Site Heading where a Person's eye wants to be drawn towards.....writing is somewhat like music, at least for me, and for example my own punctuation of five dots (.....) I use as a "drift" (this generally denotes slow movement) to a linked sentence, or even a linked paragraph, rather than a full stop (. I generally use to denote stop and start, or stop).

> Since we don't normally hyphenate the term Chess Variant, and since the URL does not include a hyphen, I would avoid adding one.

I think that neither of these two reasons is relevant. The explanation in my previous comment already shows that combinations that normally are not connected by a hyphen require one in larger combinations to make them parse correctly, and thus have the intended semantics. And the URL also doesn't contain a space, so this actually argues to write it as a single word. (Which, when broken over two lines, should automatically acquire a hyphen...)

I can perfectly live with the reasoning "this is just a logo, so we don't care when it is gramatically incorrect", though.

I like those last two drafts. My only issues are that some words aren't in the same font, and the pieces on the left and right seem tacked on and out of place compared to the pieces that blend into the font. But I like the idea of blending pieces in the font. It's pretty cool. 

Except for the two sans-serif Ss and the three pieces in the Chess Magnetic font (two Rooks and a Pawn), nothing in the words Chess Variant is in the same font. This is similar to what is being done in the current logo, where each letter of these two words is in a different font. I tried two Ss in different fonts but didn't like how it looked. The words The and Pages are both in Segoe.

Since spaces are not allowed in URLs, it is not confusing for a term that includes spaces to be spelled without them in an URL.  But since URLs can include hyphens, spelling the name with a hyphen without also including a hyphen in the URL would be confusing. Also, I'm not at all convinced that it would be more grammatical. If this site were on Baseball Cards, I don't think calling it The Baseball-Card Pages would be more appropriate than the Baseball Card Pages. Like Baseball Card, Chess Variant is a noun, and calling it the Chess Variant Pages means that this is a site with pages on Chess Variants, not that it is a site of pages that can be described by the adjective Chess-variant.

Regarding the hyphen, I've determined it doesn't belong there.  I couldn't remember seeing it used the way H. G. describes, but I consulted my copy of Rules for Writers to be sure.  It lists all uses for hypens, (as well as practically everything else about the English language), and this isn't one of them.

That said, H. G.'s reasoning is sound, but English is what it is.  It's not a programming language and some things are just unclear.  You just need to know (or guess) that a red rule book is a rule book that is red while the chess variant pages are pages about chess variants.  There is no default associativity, and if complete clarity is essential, it must be phrased differently (e.g., red book of rules.)

Incidentally, English has much bigger problems.  Is "or" the inclusive or or the exclusive or?  The inclusive or is typically considered to be the default interpretation, but that leads to problems.  "Satisfaction guaranteed or your money back."  Can I have both?  If the "or" is inclusive, then yes I can.  I can be satisified and still demand my money back.  Then there's the fact that "you" is both singular and plural.  And there's probably a hundred other examples.

Regarding the logo, I like the logo a couple back with the upside-down shogi king and the unicorn.  The unicorn is the perfect piece because it is close enough in appearance to the knight that chess players will recognize it clearly as a chess piece that is different.  It might be better if the king wasn't upside-down though.  I assume it was done that way to make a base for the word "The", but frankly I would just drop The from the title.  The most recent logos are clever but a little too hard to read IMO.

I also like the logo including the unicorn the best so far.  I would suggest a bit more bright coloring there (though I admit I don't know where).  My reasons pretty much echo what Jeffrey and Greg said.  I agree that the last two are pretty and clever but too complicated.

Well, I am apparently much more conservative than most. I would think more in the direction of something like this:

BTW, a Moon crescent instead of the 'C' of Chess is a nice idea.

I would avoid traditional (or not-so traditional) Jangqi or Shogi-style pieces in the logo. Too few people would recognize them as chess pieces, and when they think of chess variants they would not in the first place think about regional variants such as Chinese Chess. (In fact many people deny that these are chess variants, and if you post something about Shogi in the chess-variants section of chess.com, the moderators move it to the 'other topics' section.)

Surely an upside-down Bishop would make a much better 'T'?

Small version:

Here's a new draft:

Since the King is not the most recognizable piece in the Motif font, I replaced the King with a Rook. I tried turning it rightsideup, and it looked better. I colored the Unicorn in Red (NCS), which is how red is defined in the Natural Color System. Since a slab-serif font by the Unicorn made it look like a college sports mascot, I changed the fonts for "The" and "Pages" to match each other, and I used Futura Black Condensed.

By multiple measures, Shogi is the most popular Chess variant on this site. It is the most favorited, it is tied with Alice Chess for the highest average rating, and it is the most played game on Game Courier. So I wouldn't avoid using a Shogi piece in the logo just because it is less popular on other Chess sites. But it does make sense to not use one with Japanese writing on it, because that would be too unfamiliar to people who don't know what Shogi is. By using a Shogi piece with a Rook image, someone who doesn't know anything about Shogi may gather that it is a Rook-like piece for a game that is similar to or related to Chess.

Very nice.  I like both Fergus's latest and H. G.'s (except for the backwards E).  Either one would be a significant improvement.

Actually, I'm now thinking H. G.'s logo should go on the main page where the large logo is now, and Fergus's should replace the small logo in the upper-left corner of all the pages

I made some tweaks to my previous draft. I moved the Unicorn closer, I positioned it and the word "PAGES" to not go above or below the main text, I put the words "THE" and "PAGES" into uppercase, I used the normal size Futura Black for "THE", and I positioned that word slightly lower than the very top.