As I mentioned in my last post, I’m working for a few progressive campaigns around Minnesota. One that I just pushed live is for Marcus Harcus, a progressive activist in North Minneapolis. Marcus is a smart politician with great policy ideas and a lot of youthful energy. Plus, he’s just an overall nice guy and family man. This campaign is important to me not just because Marcus is a good friend, but because he’s running to be my representative, and I think he’d reflect my values well. He is the face of the changing Northside. Good luck, Marcus!

I’m currently building sites for a few progressive campaigns, and I’m happy to announce the launch of the first of these. I recently did a little identity freshening for the Joe Bodell for Minnetonka City Council campaign site. Joe is a strong progressive who is maybe best known as one of the founders of the Minnesota Progressive Project. I got introduced to Joe and his campaign via Tony Petrangelo, another MN Progressive Project contributor and fellow web developer, who suggested Joe’s site could use some work. Check out the result of my handiwork at joebodell.com.

Nintendo got it. Apple don’t.

I got to try two new toys today: The MacBook and the DS Lite. I stopped off at the Apple store today on my way home from work, mostly since I hadn’t had a chance to see the MacBooks up close yet. And, let me just say, I was not impressed. Previously, I had been drooling over the black MacBook, and was even considering getting one, but now that I’ve looked at it, I’m reconsidering. The new keyboard doesn’t bother me — it’s a bit weird, true, but it’s not uncomfortable. But it really isn’t that attractive. The black plastic looks cheap — the ThinkPad I’m writing this on right now is of a much higher quality. Maybe if they had gone glossy with it, like the white MacBooks and the iPods, it would be a different story. But the matte black just doesn’t work. My other big complaint is the screen. Why, oh why, did they go glossy. The colors may be brighter, but at the expense that the screen reflects everything. It’s bad both functionally and aesthetically; it really does serve to cheapen the perceived quality of the machine from me, and makes it feel just like every other PC laptop out there. I don’t know what Apple is thinking, but I hope they don’t continue this trend.

Nintendo on the other hand is doing awesome. The DS Lite is simply amazing. I’m getting one the first chance I have. The case is simple beautiful — I read a comment by someone today that it looks as if it had been designed by Jonathan Ive, and it really does. It feels like Apple hardware. And, as icing on the cake, I got to try it for the first time while playing the New Super Mario Bros. There’s nothing like feeling like you’re 7 again to give you the warm fuzzies about a device.

The reason they’re looking for a new logo is threefold (from their logo contest details page):

• The Beastie mascot is not unique to FreeBSD. Instead it is a mascot for the entire collection of BSD-based operating systems including 4BSD, NetBSD, and FreeBSD.
• The Beastie mascot has been combined with the text “FreeBSD” in several different ways. While the various combinations are nice, the lack of a consistent logo leaves an unprofessional impression.
• The current informal logos generally do not work well in two or three colors (such as black and white) or when scaled to small or large sizes. These requirements are important for use in the press.

Two and three are easily solved by coming up with a standard icon and type treatment, and creating variations based on color and format (horizontal rectangular vs square). What is interesting about the first point is that there are three open source BSD-derived OSs: FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD. Both FreeBSD and NetBSD have traditionally used the Beastie/daemon icon (OpenBSD uses a blowfish). NetBSD just changed their logo to use a flag instead of the daemon(s), so that leaves FreeBSD as the only open source BSD that still has ties to Beastie. From another of their pages, it sounds like they want to continue to use him as a mascot, and that the logo should in fact work well with him when placed together.

Thus, I wanted my first logo concept to pay homage to Beastie, but still act as an iconic, professional, symbolic mark. Here is where I am currently at:

If anyone has any comments from a design perspective, please let me know. I can be reached at jesse | at | jesseross | dot | com. If you are a FreeBSD user and you want to weigh in on where this is at and offer some suggestions before I submit it to the contest, that would be much appreciated.

EDIT: This logo is now available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. If you use this logo, please provide my name and a link to my website in the below format in a location appropriate for your use (Acknowledgment document or site footer, for example):

Logo designed by Jesse Ross, http://jesseross.com/

At Zentropy, I’m working on a couple of projects for Gushers fruit snacks. Pretty cool Flash stuff, too. I’m working on phase two of a site called Gushers Mystery, and one more Gushers-related project I’ll give you all the details on when it’s live.

In my free time, I’ve been doing work for GNUstep, an open source implementation of the OpenStep specification, which was also used as the basis for Apple’s Mac OS X. It’s a very cool project, with a lot of really awesome developers. Some of the developers of GNUstep are also creating desktop distros which use GNUstep to provide a programming framework on top of Linux or other OSs, such as Windows or *BSD. There is even a GNUstep LiveCD available to check out the cool stuff people are making.

As my part of GNUstep, I’ve been working on UI and Identity issues. I’ve done some mockups [1] [2] of an updated desktop and theme, and icons for a bunch of projects, such as Installer.app, HelpViewer.app and Gorm.app.

I also recently did their promotional booklet [PDF, 2.9MB] for FOSDEM, the Free and Open Source Developers European Meetup.

So, those are the details. Pretty fun stuff… I can’t complain.