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Curl hearts Mozilla

daniel.haxx.se

267 points by olsgaard 10 years ago · 49 comments

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bch 10 years ago

> Also, when talking and comparing brands and their recognition and importance in a global sense, curl is of course nothing next to Mozilla.

You're too humble, Daniel. cURL might not be on the lips of of the general public as much as Mozilla/Firefox is, but curl is an important piece of code touching the lives of probably everybody, whether they know it or not.

  • AznHisoka 10 years ago

    i use curl everyday. i use Mozilla maybe once a month. its absolutely no contest which is more important to me

hoodoof 10 years ago

This is such a non issue that it didn't even warrant the blog post.

  • jdub 10 years ago

    Branding is very often an important issue to open source projects, contributors, organisations, and enthusiastic users. Emotions run high when we get things wrong, and rightly so -- people invest their lives in these worlds.

    It's fantastic that Daniel thought ahead to make sure both communities were on the same page, and wrote this post to keep everyone informed and (hopefully) happy.

  • kevindong 10 years ago

    I wasn't even aware that curl had a logo.

    • Waterluvian 10 years ago

      I wasn't aware that curl had a community or website. I always thought of it as just a command in my terminal. Guess my eyes are open just a little bit wider than yesterday.

    • jschulenklopper 10 years ago

      Same here. `curl(1)` is such a program that you use all the time on many different machines... without ever visiting the home page of the project. I think I saw that curl logo for the first time today...

  • cooper12 10 years ago

    There was actually a HN comment thread on it for the Mozilla announcement: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13425609. The commenters mainly noted how similar the logos are. This could lead to possible confusion and I think pre-empting it is best to defuse any drama before it starts.

    • rangibaby 10 years ago

      > how this could lead to possible confusion

      I sincerely doubt it. There are two groups in the world:

      Group A: What the hell is a Mozilla?

      Group B: knows the difference between cURL and Mozilla

      • bearcobra 10 years ago

        Reading some of the stories about users finding mention of cURL in software acknowledgements and emailing for support makes me think that there is a Group C that could easily be confused

        • JadeNB 10 years ago

          I think your Group C, "easily confused", probably has substantial overlap with Group A, "what is a Mozilla?".

      • lbotos 10 years ago

        But what about the third who may see a cURL logo after the new Mozilla logo and say, "oh, I didn't realize cURL was a Mozilla project."

      • ma2rten 10 years ago

        I think less people know about curl than mozilla, not to mention that curl has a logo (I had no idea).

      • Esau 10 years ago

        Agreed. I commented on the similarity earlier but I don't think there will ever really be confusion.

  • wvh 10 years ago

    Nowadays outrage is all the rage, I guess communicating early and briefly could nip some minor drama in the bud. This doesn't seem likely, but you never know...

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firebird_%28database_server%29...

  • Sylos 10 years ago

    You'd think so, yeah, but I'm sure there's going to be some people who just want to be negative about it, and I'm glad that I have a link that I can smack those people with.

stevoski 10 years ago

For prior art of using :// in branding, here's the IT consulting company I used to run in the early 2000's: https://www.sunesis.com.au/

They haven't changed their website since I sold out in 2003, quite an astonishing thing for a website.

You can see, though, that the graphic designer got a bit confused and reversed the order to //:. He insisted on leaving it that way because design reasons.

ma2rten 10 years ago

> I'm Daniel Stenberg, lead developer of curl and employed by Mozilla.

cooper12 10 years ago

Nice to see them making it clear that there's no conflict at all. Is it just me or does the "L" in curl's logo look too much like a "1"? I think a font with an "L" that's curved like an "S" would be more distinct and would match the monospaced look.

wodenokoto 10 years ago

Wow, people are really hating on this in the comments. Makes me wonder, are there any examples of new brand identity that has been generally well received at first?

The big things I remember is Uber, Instagram, Google and Yahoo, and I don't remember those being followed by any nice words.

Looking back I consider both Google and Yahoo to have been an improvement. I'm on the fence about Instagram. Not sure if I like the new one, but also not sure if sticking with the old one would make the service look dated. I still think Uber is really bad.

  • eddieroger 10 years ago

    People don't like change, and it's never been easier to talk about how much specific changes bother some people, and find others who agree with them. Meanwhile, people who don't really care what a logo looks like continue to say nothing as they used to.

  • slig 10 years ago

    Also the current Airbnb logo which is actually pretty awful.

jschulenklopper 10 years ago

TIL that curl _had_ a logo. I've been using it almost daily since quite a while... but apparently never visited the project website after the new logo / wordmark of curl.

BTW, Mozilla's logo is a bit smarter, by using the colon instead of an "i" and the slashes instead of two "l"s. In hindsight, they picked the right name in 1998 for this logo.

jve 10 years ago

I'v read it as "hurts" and reading the article couldn't understand whether it was a sarcasm or what. Then I thought HN headline was wrong. Then I re-read it as hearts :)

chaosfox 10 years ago

curlill hearts moz

GogoAkira 10 years ago

they're just trying what other ideas such as nations are already doing, it's called nationalism, well this is browseronism, they are asking us to love the browser, it's gonna be a little bit harder since we wasn't born in Mozillandia, that would help then you could tell people about their ancestors etc.

blablabla123 10 years ago

This is so romantic ;)

kentor 10 years ago

At least curl is not using symbols for leetspeak.

hartator 10 years ago

Until in 5 years, Mozilla sues Curl.

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