OPCUG Logo ←Old     New→

I've set myself to rework the OPCUG logo in such a way that it would display nicely on both a web page and a PDF file, well it turn out to be a lot harder than I anticipated, but I think I got something interesting.

If you check http://opcug.ca/history/logo/logo.html, you will see the OPCUG logo and the PC News header at various resolutions, and if you click on the PDF file (near the top), you see that the logo display quite nicely at any size and any background.

One of the thing I wanted to do was to avoid a proprietary solution, but despite my best effort, I've not been able to find a good format that was supported by free programs, from the drawing program all the way to the PDF file. At the end I had to settle with CorelDraw12, which is available for 1 month evaluation.

I took the opportunity to fix some minor problems with the logo, such as removing small white gaps at the end of some of the curves.

Given that the clock/calendar we just ordered used the color "Process Blue" for the logo, I thought that I would use the same color for the logo, which is similar to the original blue.

To generate the PDF file, I inserted the WMF graphics into Word, and used PDFCreator to generate the PDF file. All the files are fairly small, which should help to reduce the size of the PDF newsletter.

The big advantage of the WMF format is that it support vector graphics, that means that you can insert a WMF graphic into many Windows program and scale it to any size you want without getting into resolution problems.

The problem with the WMF format is that it is limited to the Windows platform, it is supported mostly only by commercial programs, and it's a format that is not supported by all internet browser, that's why I had to resort to create GIF files.

GIF files are bitmap based, that means that they don't scale very well unless one use a high resolution file, but those are big and slow to download. In order to have good a looking logo and keep the file small, I created a number of versions with various resolution.

I selected the GIF format instead of the PNG because the transparent layer is better supported by various programs with the GIF format, and since that GIF patent is now expired, there is no problem in using it. Strangely, CorelDraw12 created a GIF file that had all the colors very wrong, so I instead I exported the logo into a high resolution PNG file, and used it to created the GIF files using IrfanView.

Note that the GIF files' name has the width in pixel, the height is slightly smaller.

I was hoping to use the SVG format, but I found that that format is not very compatible between various programs, and I was not able to create a satisfactory PDF file with it. Still, the logo in the SVG format is available, and looks even nicer at high magnification using the Adobe's SVG viewer in the logo's web page I created.

P.S.
The OPCUG logo was created by Mary Seal in 1995 (see Jan 1995 entry in the history page).