paper, marble, stone, granite, plastic, wood, brick, cardboard, line-drawing, computer generated, blend between real and computer generated? What do you want the symbols to look like: engraved and inked in, written using a pencil, brush, typewriter, …, standing out, etc.

Were those questions asked and answered?

My preference would be to make it look like a blend between a computer rendering and a real puzzle of non-glossy marble pieces/paper that have height, length and width like in a real puzzle. I’m not sure how I would draw the symbols, no relief like in a book, or some relief (sunken or raised) like lettering on stone objects.

Reason:

It looks like a real puzzle you could pick up and play with.

The new logo doesn’t look like that. It looks like something created on the computer.

You can’t get a warm fuzzy, nostalgic feeling with a logo like that, so it is worse.

You can get a warm, fuzzy, nostalgic feeling from the feel and smell from real puzzles and books. The old logo resembles that more, so it is better.

I think the new designer designed the new logo at a bigger size than we see on screen. At that size it might look slick, but at smaller sizes it suffers in comparison to the old logo.

And I know the convention nowadays is to put the search field in the upper-right side of the page, but that spot isn’t a “hotspot” of the users attention/gaze (in this design) so it is placed wrongly. The rest of your navigation is all in the left column (the elements surrounding the search box are irrelevant for a majority of your users), so why place this 1 element way out there? No first time user is going to notice it.

First the most controversial one: the logo. I think it’s a great idea to re-design it while being faithful to the old one, like most people, but this version looks more like a quick preview render. There should be more contrast between the puzzle pieces. The older one looked like curved pieces forming a sphere, while this one looks just like a simple sphere with a texture. Probably it’s not only the render’s fault, but also the resample filter used to make the small version of it. Strangely, as other users said, the old logo looked 3D but this one looks like 2D, more exactly like a vector drawing with some shading. The changes in the characters are fine, as a trekkie I enjoyed the klingon character but I perfectly understand an encyclopedia’s logo is not a place for it. And the changes in the font for the Wikipedia text.. I didn’t notice that until I read it here, but apart from hating Comic Sans and loving Fixedsys Excelsior and Topaz I don’t pay attention to the fonts.

And about the vector theme: I don’t like the colors chosen, but this is only my opinion probably. I would use darker colors for the separation lines. I like the new placement for the shearch box, I know lots of people that didn’t use it previously because in the tool bar they thought it was only for searching inside the current article. We should understand that most Wikipedia readers aren’t wikipedians but casual users, and if almost everyone puts the search box in that place, it’s more intuitive. I think it would be better to move it to the space between the page-discussion| |read-source tabs, but it’s fine the place it is now. I don’t like the collapsing menus because I read always the same article in three languages. I think the default option should be not collapsing them and making the collapsed menus available in the options for logged users. Again, this is probably something that only I find annoying so I don’t want to rant about something only I want.

Pelayo, from Spain

How about making the 3D model publicly availibe and see what the community can do with it? It’s a very interesting object, both in digital and physical shape!

what do you guys think?