Sun Microsystems logo: the most beautiful logo design (objectively) (opens in new tab)

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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...

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.

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

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...

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Clever? Most definitely so.

Beautiful? I’ve seen better.

I agree. I miss Sun..

"We make the network"

"un un un un"