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Important for StackExchange staff!

We were approached by Stephen Wolfram, creator of Mathematica, through one of his employees who is a regular user here. He asked if our community can consider including "Wolfram Language" in our header image, which is the official name of the programming language for several years now. We discussed this within our community and decided that we support this idea. Through another voting, we decided the exact wording of the new image.

In this post, I have given the finished header images for a final inspection and the community has found them to be good. The following zip file contains SVG images that should replace our current logos for the main site and meta.

Download zip through tinyupload.com

Request: Can our designated designer check the images for quality and include them on our site?

The votes indicate that the community considers the version with the ampersand and without "the" as their favourite new header image. I present here the polished versions for the main- and meta-logo.

The images of the logo are rasterized in the size in which they will appear on most screens. For the main logo, this is 260x50 pixel. The meta logo is a bit wider to make room for the "meta". This is in agreement to most logos I have checked on StackExchange which pushed the meta string to the right.

Main

enter image description here

enter image description here

Meta

enter image description here

enter image description here

Appendix

Looks good! Thanks for all your hard work @halirutan!

We should not forget that many of us helped. We tried for a long time to get rid of the polygon artefacts by massaging the SVG export. b3m2a1 improved his SVG exporter to let us try different things. Many others provided helpful comments and ideas. Lucas Lang finally did the only right thing fixing the graphics artefacts by building a connection graph of similarly coloured polygons and joining them while b3m, Szabolcs and me (maybe others too!) tried to attack the problem from the SVG side.

So what's really great is that we can always count on our people to join forces and that we are such a great team.

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    Looks good! Thanks for all your hard work @halirutan! – Carl Lange May 4 at 7:08
  • I don't like it but I can understand its appeal; thank you @halirutan for respecting a minority opinion; obviously, congrats – user42582 May 4 at 9:11
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    @user42582 Well, the & option wasn't my first choice either. I was more the "and" type, but I respect the votes of the community. In the end, I care more about that the font-hinting is acceptable and that structure and colours have a balanced look&feel. – halirutan♦ May 4 at 9:24
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    As a compromise between "&" and "and" are you sure we can't reconsider Mathematica 'n' Wolfram Language (as in Rock 'n' Roll)? But more seriously: Great job! – JimB May 4 at 17:41
  • Why did we not go with anything with "the" in it? I had thought the general consensus was for "& the" ? And that since we were making the move to be more in-line with the company literature, that we would have "the Wolfram Language"? Regardless, I'm glad to have a better answer to give when I am asked what I program in, and this looks very nice! Congrats & thank you :D but in regards to the new logo, I love the solid coloring, but my brain really wants the "the" there, to be proper. What was the ultimate motivation behind removing it? – CA Trevillian May 6 at 6:01
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    @CATrevillian it lost the race: mathematica.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2469/5478 – Kuba♦ May 6 at 6:52
  • @Kuba thank you! Now, when shall we see the change occur? [How exactly does this occur?] It will surely look nicer the sooner we are all able to enjoy it! Thanks again to halirutan, looking forward to this shiny new site logo. – CA Trevillian May 6 at 7:02
  • @CATrevillian chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/50157999#50157999 – Kuba♦ May 6 at 7:07
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    Dropping a note here to say that we're aware of this discussion. I don't have any real info for you but I do appreciate the systematic way you've gone through this discussion! We'll be considering this request but do be aware that we have some very busy people on our design team and, even with designs created, they need to go through an internal review process and there's some other considerations about subtitles for our sites. But, we're aware and discussing. I'm pingable here or in your chat room if I can help. – Catija♦ May 10 at 4:43
  • @Catija Looking at the way changes are handled that are initiated mainly by SE and on the other hand your totally non-committal answer (“I don’t have any real information for you...”) to this site’s feature-request, I cannot help to note, how cozy the rules of the game look on your side. That kind of non-committal attitude would never get you a new site on Area 51, but it seems to suffice to keep lots of sites going? Obviously too much market power gets transferred in winner-take-all markets. Maybe you can come up with a slight bit more? Thanx – gwr May 16 at 5:13
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    @gwr There's a lot more info in chat, if you care to follow it. The TL;DR is that I have about 15-20 sites in queue for design changes or full designs. I have one designer to work on them. Even if we're willing to do this, it's got to go through design review and, I'm sorry, but it's not going to skip the line completely. Y'all have your priorities and I respect that but I'm going to ask you to also respect that we have 170+ sites and limited internal resources. – Catija♦ May 16 at 5:21
  • @Catija I actually followed chat and would still not drop “non-committal” from my post here. I totally see your problem, but to me that kind of “underfunding” looks like winner-take-all, e.g. there seems to not be enough cost/risk for SE so that it can get away with not putting sufficient resources into handling its sites. Imagine other markets, take a step back and reconsider your message. Can you really not even give us a reasonable timeline? – gwr May 16 at 5:33
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    @gwr I can pull a number out for you but it won't mean anything, so I guess the answer to your question is "no, at this point, I can't". Maybe that will change in a week but there's a lot of stuff going on right now and even stuff that I promised two weeks ago is still waiting on review to build out... so I hope you can see why I'm really hesitant to promise anything until we get some kinks worked out. – Catija♦ May 16 at 5:44
  • @Catija Good to know. Disappointing that we won't have the site design updated any time soon, but I do appreciate that SE is willing to actually respond here and not have us just screaming into the void... One question that I don't know where to ask: are there infrastructure plans in the pipeline or could there be such that we can more directly and quickly update our site design? – b3m2a1 May 18 at 0:04
  • @b3m2a1 Somehow missed that ping, sorry! At this point, we're in a state of flux. Right now we're trying to stabilize that before we start thinking about that. There are some thoughts on letting sites do some customizations on their own but this is generally thinking about sites without designs at all, not sites with designs. – Catija♦ May 25 at 4:02

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