I am thinking of creating a custom logo for Modern Fortran for VS Code as opposed to the “F” logo that we currently have. Not sure if it makes sense and where we would use it, since all other Programming Language extensions (see Python, Go, Julia, etc.) are using their respective icons as logos. I would be interested to see what others think of this. Is it unnecessary? Do you have any good design ideas?
We cannot use this or any other logo containing the VS Code (“fish”) logo without explicit permission from Microsoft. This is only for demonstration purposes. If we accept any “Modern Fortran for VS Code” logos containing the “fish” symbol we will submit them to Microsoft for review before usage.
Just some food for thought: you may save yourself and the future community contributors from trouble with MS if you avoid the MS logo for VS but instead either do nothing different from now or perhaps include smaller text on the side (where you now have the fish) that says “VS Code” in the same font style as the F but perhaps in a different color, say that blue one.
I had to include the notice because I made use of the “fish” logo and also alert anyone else that wanted to iterate on my design. We don’t have to have it in the Modern Fortran extension logo.
My interactions with MS and the VS Code team are extremely positive and I doubt we will have any trouble with getting permission. Especially since we propose a legitimate use for the logo and we are not defacing or altering it in any way.
FYI
Things we’re not ok with
Not OK
Using the product name — Visual Studio Code or VS Code — on your website, product, service, or in your domain names.
I don’t think it is necessary to connect the Modern Fortran Extension logo to VS Code by visually including its logo. It feels a bit redundant when finding it for example in the VS Code marketplace. To connect visually I personally prefer color, for example we could use the VS Code colors in the F-icon like shown here in this quick hack:
Yes, I’d keep using the main logo as you currently do. What would a custom logo accomplish? I don’t think you’re trying to differentiate from some other extension that uses the same logo.
No definitely not trying to differentiate. I was thinking of using this as the icon for the webpage (which has not been built yet), because I noticed that it’s difficult to navigate browser tabs when all the icons are the “F” logo (fortran-lang.org, fortran-lang.discourse.group, previously fortls but I made an icon for that).
Welcome to Fortran-lang Discourse @alejandro, I did something similar for the fortls webpage see the main page’s banner fortls although in that case the image is actually blinking.
I see, the problem with that is that many places won’t allow the animation to run (unless made into a GIF) because running code in SVGs is consider a security vulnerability.
Thank you all for the suggestions. I think I will stick with what we have for all the docs and for the documentation web page’s symbol (i.e. asset on the browser tab) I will use either the design I originally suggested or @awvwgk’s, just to indicate that the tab is not Discourse or fortran-lang.org.
