Images, banners and logos for the Practicalli series of books and other communication channels where Clojure is taught by John Stevenson.
I am not a graphic designer, however, with the use of Inkscape and Scalable Vector Graphics, I can create some nice visualisations of information and themes.
## External references
- [Free SVG graphics](https://freesvg.org/)
## Practicalli logo
I have used the colours used by the Clojure logos to create a very simple logo for Practicalli. The logo is a simple circle, represented by two half circles of the Green and Blue colours.
In the center, the logo has the name of Practicalli in short form, P9I. With internationalisation and localisation, the characters in between the first and last characters are replaced by a number that is the total number of those characters. There are 9 character inside the first and last, so we get P9I. These characters have been created as separate items, so they can be coloured differently. The 9 character is de-emphasised by using a grey colour and lowering the character position to suggest lesser importance.
## YouTube channel banner Practicalli Spacemacs playlist contains the all the videos created for the Practicalli Spacemacs book.
I have also started running a Clojure study group via the MeetAMentor community, using Hangouts On Air, which uses my Youtube account and imagery. So I have updated my YouTube banner from a nice picture of my cat, to a simple representation of the topics I cover in my channel.
YouTube can be viewed on different devices and each one is supposed to have a different size (although when actually testing this, it seems that YouTube uses pretty much the same part of the banner image regardless of media).
Initially I just created a design with the Logo’s, however, this felt a little too simplified and would not have said anything to those who didnt recognise the logos.
The design was refactored to place the names the logos represented under each logo. The font used was Ubuntu as its an elegant font to use. The colour of each name was taken from the predominant colour of the logo it describes. There was not much difference between the Green and Blue of the Clojure logo but Green seemed to work better for the text.
The finished banner design is as follows. It is so big so that it will fit TV displays running the YouTube app (either directly or via a device).
The simplified design worked very well. After looking at it for a while, I realised that it wasnt specifically calling out the ClojureScript side of things and so I should add the ClojureScript logo and a logo for Figwheel. It seems figwheel didnt have an official logo, so I made my own.
I added CLJS logo from https://github.com/cljs/logo
The idea behind the Figwheel logo is to use the heart shape that is exposed when you cut a fig in half. Depending on the fig the inners are roughly the shape of a heart (especially when held upside down). A quick search on Wiki Media revealed a nice heart-shape SVG image. The heart image is in the public domain and is freely usable without conditions.
As Figwheel is for ClojureScript, then the heartshape was incorporated into the existing logo. The heart contains the CLJS text part of the logo to represent Figwheel managing ClojureScript code. There is also a general theme of making ClojureScript feel loved, which again is what Figwheel makes developers feel.
The updated logo with ClojureScript and Figwheel looks just as simple as before, yet feels more comprehensive.
The updated banner looks as follows on my YouTube channel:
## YouTube new banner - white background
I have changed the YouTube banner image to have a white background so it blends in better with the YouTube webpage and the newly created practicalli website.
