Which font should we use in the Jupyter Book logo?

We are thinking about updating the fonts that are used in the Jupyter Book logo, in order to make it look a bit nicer, and to give it a more distinct feel. This is likely not the “final logo design”, but hopefully an iterative improvement to our current logo. We’ll shoot for Helvetiva Neue for the “Jupyter” part (since that’s what the Jupyter design guidelines recommend), and I’m trying to figure out a good font for the “book” part.

If you’re wondering what kind of ideas we want to evoke with the logo - think “blending computation and narrative, with a shout-out to MyST markdown”

Here are a few options (including the original), would love feedback on which people like the most in the poll below, or thoughts in the comments :slight_smile:

image

  • Original
  • Roboto
  • Roboto Slab
  • Garamond

0 voters

I found Roboto slab the easiest to read on a screen.

Roboto looks a little ‘cramped’ and Garamond is too boring!

Hey Chris, not sure this is the answer you want – totally makes sense to change “jupyter” to the typeface recommended by their guidelines, but I really like whatever the current monoscript is that you’re using for “book”. It has a certain “oomph”. But maybe you don’t want to emphasize the “book” part that much

If I had to pick one of the new three I’d go with Garamond.

The meanline (top of the lowercase letters) is much lower for Garamond – the “jupyter” and the 'book" are written the same font size? – so that looks like it doesn’t match, but I think Garamond has the “bookiest” feel of the three.
You could do something like convert type to outlines in Illustrator and stretch the Garamond a little to get the meanlines to line up.

that’s my failed graphic designer opinion, free of charge and open source :slight_smile:

ah interesting - you mean something like:

image

?

I voted for Roboto Slab with the same primary reasoning as @nicholdav - the meanline (aka x-height) is the best match. That seems like an important typographical principle when blending serif and sans-serif (I don’t have my copy of Bringhurst handy to check). I like Garamond as a classic typeface that connects to the history of bookmaking, though!

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That’s a great point about x-height. I hadn’t considered this. We can certainly change the size of the other fonts in order to get the x-height the same, but there are definitely some fonts that are more compatible at similar sizes than others.

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Slab feels like a serif/ courier font, which goes well w nicely presented but automated theme of book.

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I’m going with the consensus of I’d really like the Garamond to be the same height as Jupyter, and therefore Roboto Slab from the 3 original gets my vote.

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Ya I think the challenge with Garamond is that if you wanna get the x-height to be the same as Helvetica Neue, you have to make the font quite a bit larger:

and the whole group for comparison again

I don’t think that bothers me that much actually - but I am, of course, not a designer!

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yeah I was just thinking the same thing lol…sadly I am not a designer either :man_facepalming:

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ooh I’m glad you recommended looking at Garamond again…now I’m wondering if we should use jupyter in Garamond as well, because that Garamond j is a thing of beauty

image

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Do jupyter and book have to be on the same line? If it doesn’t you’d have more freedom to play with the font heights, e.g.

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Ah cool idea! I think that rearranging things is definitely worth exploring, though feel like at that point we are straying into “we should really get a designer” territory haha

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jb

Two weights of Atkinson Hyperlegible, by the Braille Institute, designed to be, well… hyper-legible. No extra kerning done.

While not under SIL/OFL, the terms of use are quite reasonable and compatible with deployment in open source, which can’t be said for a lot of other “designerly” fonts.

Making the brace into an open book is a whacking good idea, and probably beyond my skill, especially at icon scale, but would make a very nice favicon, etc.

While most open source teams struggle on without having an on-call designer, and a team of engineers that actually listen to them, it’s relatively easy to pick-and-choose concepts from published design guides like NASA and even some other open source projects. Some light guidance, encoded in pictures with guides and the barest of narrative, e.g. the jupyter{book} wordmark should always have one } of space around it go really far, when put in a place people can link to.

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Oh, and further aside:

if you can fish up a designer, just try to get them to deliver things in open source formats, e.g. SVG, PDF, etc. Many, individual SVG/PDF that open in browsers are strictly better than one multi-page-board-layout-space-layer monstrosity. Semi-related: engineers generally don’t care how magic or shiny your cloud-based-all-in-one-mockup-design-system-toothpaste-factory thing is, if they can’t actually get at it, or link to it, or extract colors and whitespace from it, without a login. Ditto for fonts: if it’s not available from a reputable provider (e.g. as source code, packages, or from a known-good entity like wikimedia), it probably doesn’t matter how beautiful the font sets off the blue of my eyes.

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What about the Vegur font? It looks very similar to the one in the Jupyter logo, but is free (CC0 free). See Vegur

Screenshot from 2021-05-07 13-48-14

Here it is in the action: Jupyter[Lab] Language Server Protocol — Language Server Protocol integration for Jupyter[Lab] (see the logo)

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My vote is for Papyrus :laughing:

(Apologies for not having any constructive feedback…)

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Papyrus makes a cameo in one of my favorite humor pieces written from the point of view of an anthropomorphic font. I’d probably get flagged for actually posting the link, as it is not appropriate for all audiences, but the venerable McSweeney’s piece titled I’m Comic Sans… always gives me great joy to promote.

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