H. G. Muller wrote on Fri, Sep 1, 2017 05:16 PM UTC:
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.
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.