The Perl Logo

The Repository

Purpose

The purpose of the perl-assets repository is to create a home for a new, updated Perl logo. One which the Perl communities are free to use and encouraged to create derivative works from. This logo is hereby released under CC-BY. We hope that you will take it, use it and make it your own.

How it's Organized

There are several folders:

• ./base contains the original camel artwork. This is the camel which is the source of the more polished artwork which is found elsewhere. All art in this repository is licensed under CC-BY, so you are free to use these images as source material.
• ./experimental contains experiments from which were used in coming up with final logo designs.
• ./blessed contains the "official" logos. If you are designing icons for an Operating System, an IDE or need a favicon.ico, we would ask you to draw from these assets.

Attribution

If you are working in a medium where you can add an attribution, please link back to https://perl.org.

Our Attributions

Since we are asking for attribution, it's only fair for us to do the same. The camel design was created for us by Zach Roszczewski and commissioned by Neil Bowers. The original concepts were iterated upon based on feedback from Neil Bowers, Babs Veloso and Olaf Alders.

The blessed and experimental logos are the work of Sébastien Feugère.

Feedback on Sébastien Feugère's work was kindly given (in first name alphabetical order) by:

• Aristotle Pagaltzis
• Bruno Meneguele
• D Ruth Holloway
• Dallas Hogan
• Graham Knop
• Kenta Kobayashi
• Leo Lapworth
• Makoto Nozaki
• Marc Perry
• Mohammad Anwar
• Philippe Bruhat
• Robert Spier
• Thibault Duponchelle

The Backstory

The story of Perl's logo has been well documented. An excellent starting point is Neil Bowers' blog post from December of 2020:

• https://neilb.org/2020/12/04/perl-and-camels.html

A quick summary of Neil's post is:

History of the Camel Symbol

• The Camel: In 1991, O'Reilly published Programming Perl, the first major book about the Perl language. Like other O'Reilly books, it featured an animal on the cover, and for Perl, it was a camel. This led to a long-standing association between camels and Perl.

• Other Logos: Over the years, other logos like an onion (connected to Larry Wall's "State of the Onion" talks) and a velociraptor were used in some contexts, but the camel has remained the most iconic symbol.

O'Reilly's Position

• Neil B reached out to Tim O'Reilly to clarify the situation, as various rumors about O'Reilly’s stance on using the camel logo had circulated.

• Tim O'Reilly's Statement: O'Reilly confirmed that Perl cannot use the specific camel image from the Programming Perl book, but a new camel image could be used. The key restriction is that no other publisher can use a camel on the cover of a book about Perl, which limits its commercial use.

A New Camel for Perl

• Neil Bowers suggests that Perl could adopt a new camel logo—separate from the one used on O'Reilly's book cover—and use it as the official symbol for the Perl language.

• The goal is to create a logo that represents not just the language but also the community, one that feels friendly and welcoming.

• Neil Bowers acknowledges that the "camel association" will always be tied to Perl, even if a new logo is chosen. He suggests this is a pragmatic approach, emphasizing that the restrictions around using camels on books are not a major issue.

What About the Onion?

The onion is the logo for The Perl and Raku Foundation. BooK discussed the onion logo with Allison Randal (who had just finished her tenure as president of the Perl Foundation) during an interview at OSCON Europe in October 2005.

Here's a transcript:

• Philippe And what about the logo? Personally, I saw it as a way to become more independent from the O'Reilly legalese and the fact that everywhere you use the Camel you need to acknowledge the fact that the Camel is a trademark of O'Reilly. But is there something else?
• Allison Well, that is a nice side effect. The main thing is that because of the trademark relationship, there's a few places where we really can't use the Camel at all. Say, if we published a collection of Perl documentation or something like that, we really could not use the Camel in that context. Because that's the one that O'Reilly is protecting it for. So we started the process just to give us another option in a few places. But as we go on it seems to have kind of taken a life of its own. It's been showing up on YAPC T-shirts and things like that.
• Philippe It's a nice logo, because the onion has been part of Larry's talks for a while, so it's already part of the culture.
• Allison Yeah. We spent a good deal of time looking for the right logo. We tried a whole bunch of different things. At the very beginning we thought "Not an onion, because it doesn't make a very good logo." We looked for something else and just kept coming back to the onion because of that connection to Perl history. Then we found an artist who did an onion that we liked so we went with it.
• Philippe Who's the author of the onion?
• Allison His name is Devin Shane Muldoon. He's an artist in the San Francisco area. He's really talented.

A French translation of the interview was published in GNU/Linux Magazine France in 2006.

See also

• https://dev.to/thibaultduponchelle/the-perl-complex-topic-of-logos-3161
• https://dev.to/smonff/notes-about-the-ongoing-perl-logo-discussion-4c80
• https://youtu.be/areXIy7UKyA?si=IRyarBguLwCuBXtd&t=1701

FAQ

• Will the logos change?

  We currently consider this artwork to be production ready, but also a work in progress. We may alter the logos moving forward if we see a need, but we don't imagine radical changes to be forthcoming.

• Who put you in charge?

  Nobody. Traditionally things happen in Perl because somebody does something and enough other people think it's worth adopting. It's in this spirit that the logo is being presented. Our hope is that all (or most) of us can standardize on the same artwork. This current working group arose out of a conversation at the 2024 Perl Toolchain Summit in Lisbon. We felt we had enough stakeholders in the same room to come to an agreement in principle and then move ahead with the project.

• Can I put this on a T-shirt, Mug or Candle?

  Yes!

• Can I put this on a book about Perl?

  No. Our understanding of O'Reilly's position is that we are free to use a camel in association with Perl, with the exception of books about Perl. See https://neilb.org/2020/12/04/perl-and-camels.html for more details.

• Who holds ownership of the logos, for copyright purposes?

  The logo is Copyright (c) 2024 Olaf Alders, licensed under the CC-BY License, Version 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.