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Sun Microsystems logo: the most beautiful logo design (objectively)

by wis on 5/14/24, 4:26 PM with 54 comments

• by crmd on 5/14/24, 6:50 PM

  Silicon Graphics is my favorite logo from this era, but Sun is solid. I have great memories of being assigned my very own Ultra 2 desktop with Creator3D graphics on the first day of my first tech job.

• by ortusdux on 5/14/24, 6:39 PM

  I've always been fond of Taiwan's recycling symbol

  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Recycle_symbol_Taiwan.s...

• by apercu on 5/14/24, 6:24 PM

  I think it's an objectively "clever" logo but not necessarily objectively "beautiful" one. Does that make sense?

• by wesamco on 5/14/24, 10:41 PM

  I just realized that the PNG file for the logo hosted on wikimedia, is 232KB! That is a lot, that's unnecessarily large for such a simple logo, so I used vtracer, a raster image to SVG vectorizer, written in Rust, and SVGO, a SVG optimizer, to create the SVG file version of the logo, it is 16KB. a 93.1% improvement in size! (and they look the same)

  The 2 commands used:

    > wget 'https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d5/SUN_microsystems_logo_ambigram.png'
    --2024-05-14 17:33:31--  https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d5/SUN_microsystems_logo_ambigram.png
    Loaded CA certificate '/etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt'
    Resolving upload.wikimedia.org (upload.wikimedia.org)... 185.15.59.240, 2a02:ec80:300:ed1a::2:b
    Connecting to upload.wikimedia.org (upload.wikimedia.org)|185.15.59.240|:443... connected.
    HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
    Length: 237484 (232K) [image/png]
    Saving to: ‘SUN_microsystems_logo_ambigram.png’
    
    SUN_microsystems_logo_ambigr 100%[=============================================>] 231.92K   821KB/s    in 0.3s
    
    2024-05-14 17:33:32 (821 KB/s) - ‘SUN_microsystems_logo_ambigram.png’ saved [237484/237484]
    
    > vtracer --input SUN_microsystems_logo_ambigram.png --output SUN_microsystems_logo_ambigram.png.svg
    Conversion successful.
    > svgo --precision 1 -o SUN_microsystems_logo_ambigram.png-opt2.svg -i SUN_microsystems_logo_ambigram.png.svg
    Done in 73 ms!
    63.162 KiB - 76% = 15.148 KiB
    >  ls -lah
    total 114M
    drwxr-xr-x 2 wis wis 4.0K May 14 17:34 .
    drwxr-xr-x 4 wis wis 4.0K May 14 17:29 ..
    -rw-r--r-- 1 wis wis 232K Jan 12  2019 SUN_microsystems_logo_ambigram.png
    -rw-r--r-- 1 wis wis  16K May 14 17:34 SUN_microsystems_logo_ambigram.png-opt2.svg
    -rw-r--r-- 1 wis wis  64K May 14 17:33 SUN_microsystems_logo_ambigram.png.svg
  
  

  Makes you think how much the Wikimedia Foundation can improve the loading experience for users and save in bandwidth costs, if they optimize all the PNG raster images that can/should be optimized, which this file is a prime example of.

• by jph on 5/14/24, 6:56 PM

  It's even better when you see the logo is made of 8 switches. In other words, 8 bits that make a byte. I'm a former Sun employee and loved that logo so much.

• by abraxas on 5/14/24, 8:10 PM

  The original Silicon Graphics logo[1] and the Nintendo 64[2]were up there with Sun's in my opinion

  1. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6c/SGI_O2_f...

  2. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/04/Nintendo_64_L...

• by maxkonrad on 5/14/24, 6:52 PM

  You should check out the Turkish Airlines logo (THY is the abbreviation for Turkish Airlines in Turkish)

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_Airlines.

  If you look at it from different angles, you can see "Thy" and, at the same time, a flying wild goose, symbolizing the airline's ability to cover long distances and soar high above.

• by wesamco on 5/14/24, 4:26 PM

  The logo SUN Microsystems had is a 4-way ambigram with rotational symmetries. Designed by Professor Vaughan Pratt of Stanford, the logo features 4 interleaved copies of the word "sun", forming a rotationally symmetric ambigram, with the letters U and N in each word forming the letter S for the next word. You can read the word "sun" if you rotate your head by 45°, 135°, 225°, or 315°.

  * Objectively according to me. :P

• by mindcrime on 5/14/24, 6:49 PM

  It is nice, unless you stare at it too long - in which case you might suddenly find yourself gibbering madly, staring at the walls, and chanting Iä! Iä! Cthulhu fhtagn! Ph'nglui mglw'nfah Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn! Iä! Iä! Iä! Iä! over and over again...

• by office_drone on 5/14/24, 6:34 PM

  Reminds me of "square Kufic" and this book https://jeffe.cs.illinois.edu/teaching/algorithms/

• by AdmiralAsshat on 5/14/24, 7:02 PM

  And it didn't cost $100,000 to create, either! [0]

  [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXT#Original_NeXT_team

• by echelon_musk on 5/14/24, 6:53 PM

  I have a circa 2000 Specialized Hardrock Comp 17" white/blue mountain bike and I always thought it was cool that the aluminum frame was "Designed by Sun Microsystems" complete with this logo.

• by Lammy on 5/14/24, 6:26 PM

  This logo is also technically a swastika in the heraldic sense (four-armed cross, arms bent at 90 degrees, with rotational symmetry).

• by 23B1 on 5/14/24, 6:55 PM

  Have stared at this logo for far too long, at some terminal in the middle of a too-cold server room, contemplating my life choices.

• by bitwize on 5/14/24, 6:22 PM

  Every time I see someone wearing a Columbia jacket I think "were they once an employee or client of Sun?"

• by jamesdhutton on 5/14/24, 7:01 PM

  And it's a perfect match to Sun's slogan: "The Network is the Computer."

• by rhelz on 5/14/24, 5:10 PM

  Yet one more amazing thing that Dr. Vaughan Pratt invented. Its depressing how big of a gap there is between the top computer scientists and everybody else.

• by fmajid on 5/14/24, 8:57 PM

  I like the Plessey Electronics (UK) logo. Looks like an oscilloscope trace, but when you look closely, it’s like “plessey” in lower case.

• by gklitz on 5/14/24, 6:53 PM

  It looks kinda like there’s a hidden swastika in there but it goes away once you start to look for it.

• by matrix12 on 5/15/24, 4:16 AM

  It's also the back side of the Facebook Thumbs up sign.

• by DrNosferatu on 5/14/24, 8:59 PM

  Clever? Most definitely so.

  Beautiful? I’ve seen better.

• by Latrina on 5/14/24, 9:00 PM

  I agree. I miss Sun..

• by sys_64738 on 5/15/24, 1:09 AM

  "We make the network"

• by yencabulator on 5/14/24, 8:05 PM

  "un un un un"