This page contains the design brief and background research for a new logo for Project Jupyter

Design brief

What is Project Jupyter?

Project Jupyter is a set of open source software projects that form the building blocks for interactive and exploratory computing that is reproducible and multi-language. The main application offered by Jupyter is the Jupyter Notebook, a web-based interactive computing platform that allows users to author documents that combine live code, equations, narrative text, interactive dashboard and other rich media. These documents provide a complete record of a computation and can be shared with others using email, Dropbox, version control systems (git/GitHub) and nbviewer.

The Jupyter Notebook is being used in all areas of academic (UC Berkeley, Stanford, UW, NYU, Cal Poly, etc.) and government (NASA JPL, KBase) research as well as industry (IBM, Facebook, Microsoft, Bloomberg, JP Morgan, WhatsApp, Quantopian, GraphLab, Enthought, Continuum, etc.). Because the architecture and building blocks of Jupyter are open, they are being used to build numerous other commercial and non-profit products and services.

Where does the Jupyter name come from?

The name has its origins in a few different places.

First, the names comes from the planet Jupiter. We wanted to pick a name that evoked the traditions and ideas of science.

Second, the core programming languages supported by Jupyter are Julia, Python and R. While the name Jupyter is not a direct acronym for these languages, it nods its head in those directions. In particular, the "y" in the middle of Jupyter was chosen to honor our Python heritage. See the logos of these languages in the languages folder of this repo.

Third, Galileo was the first person to discover the moons of Jupiter. His publication on the moons of Jupiter is an early example of research that includes the underlying data in the publication. This is one of the core ideas and requirements for scientific reproducibility. Reproducibility is one of the main focuses of our project.

• Here is a short article on Authorea about Galileo's work: Science was always meant to be open
• Here is a PDF of Siderius Nuncius.

Who is the target audience for Jupyter?

General computing and tech audience, as broadly defined as possible. This would extend from students as young as high school who are learning to program all the way up to the most advanced scientists and engineers in the world.

In what contexts will the logo be used?

• Primarily on our web pages and web applications.
• On stickers and other promotional materials. Our existing IPython stickers have been extremely popular and lots of people will put Jupyter stickers on their laptops and phones.
• In our many conference and workshop talks and tutorials.
• Less important, but eventually probably on business card.
• On third party products and services that integrate with our architecture.

Descriptive words that summarize our design preferences

• Informed
• Intelligent
• Clean and simple
• Understated
• Inclusive
• Journalistic
• Reliable
• Enjoyable
• Professional, but not overly serious
• Classic but modern. We probably will end up using san-serif fonts, but there is a strong tradition of serif fonts in science and mathematics.

What existing sites have logos, design and colors we like?

Please describe what we like about each entry.

• GitHub. Simple, conservative, excellent visual hierarchy, Octocat logo is extremely versatile.
• Airbnb. While I don't think their overall branding look matches our software and focus, I do like the simplicity and clarity of their new logo with the lowercase sans-serif "airbnb" to match.
• Square. Square really pays attention to design. While their logo is essential abstract, it closely matches their physical product (credit card scanner). Their home page is clean and simple and creates a very effective visual hierarchy and organization thorough subtle effects of white space of typographic changes. A nice example of how a single font (custom designed for Square) can span an entire site.
• 538. So many news sites these days are an explosion of visual noise. 538 uses great restraint and keeps a very clean design where content is in the forefront. One of my favorites for the extremely clear visual hierarchy and organization. I like the bold and colorful fox icon paired with the "FiveThirtyEight" in Atlas Groteque Web, which is amazingly used throughout their website. Fairly modern, but with some nods to traditonal journalism in the black and white emphasis.
• New York Times. I don't like everything about the NY Times website, but there is a lot I do like. Excellent typography - most of the home page is done with two main fonts (Georgia and NYT Cheltenham) with subtle typographical variations to create structure. Their visual hierarchy is clear, but not rigid. The overall design creates a feeling of solidity and trust. Their data visualization work is absolutely spectacular (examples from 2013)
• Economist. I am not too thrilled about their online design, but the design of their print magazine is really nice. An excellent example of visual design effectively paired with top-notch content. This is another example of written narrative that has clean modern design to go with it.
• Twitter. The combination of the name "Twitter" with the clean, simple bird icon is brilliant. Those two things are such a strong brand statement that they are able to understate so many other design aspects. I love how their page design really emphasizes user generated content.
• Nike and Apple. Some of the most powerful branding, logo and design work on the planet. I am not at all suggesting our design be Apple or Nike-like in any way. But it is notable how effective their logos are at enforcing, representing and propagating their brands, even in contexts where no text or explanation is shown.
• I (Matthias) like the scikit-image one, it is relatively simple in the form and convey a strong characteristic colorscheme. The scipy logo general form is keept, but you tend to forget it as the snake isn't as visible. I also feel like the two part with the different color act as a jigsaw puzzle, which seem to show that scikit-image is 'pluggable'

What features does the logo need to have?

• Looks good in color or black and white.
• We probably need both a graphical logo and a word mark that goes with it. In some contexts we will use both and in others, just the logo or word mark.
• Looks good at small scales.
• (Matthias) Do we want the logo to play nice with others with an area were we can come and "plug" another logo. Indeed Jupyter will be use in conjunction with other language, like have Jupyter+Julia Jupyter+Haskell ..etc ?

Background research

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidereus_Nuncius

Web Logo Design Trends: http://mashable.com/2010/09/28/web-logo-design-trends/