The Hickensian

18.07.07

Recent Work: Miro Identity

New Miro Logo

When the Participatory Culture Foundation decided to change the name of it’s open source video player ‘Democracy’ to Miro, they were looking for a new logo. I love and use Democracy daily – its the video player and podcast client that iTunes still isn’t. I approached Nicholas Reville late last year to see if I could help with the new look, and after many iterations and ideas, we settled on the new logo. I also helped out a bit with the new website, providing a basis for it’s development.

As part of my mission to use every typeface Rian Hughes has designed, miro uses his quirky PopGod font.

Miro hasn’t yet got to version 1.0, but do go and try the public preview, and spread the word about the new name!

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No.1

Paul D said 717 days ago:

Rather a nice logo. :)

Any idea what the inspiration for the new name is? “Miro” (or a close approximate thereof) happens to be the imperative form of “look” in Japanese, but that’s probably just a coincidence.

No.2

ryan said 717 days ago:

looks great!… but it looks like you need to tighten the r and o a bit.. just a suggestion! cheers

No.3

Ncus said 717 days ago:

Can’t see the image. I got error 403: porbidden.

No.4

Matthew said 717 days ago:

Looks loverley.

No.5

Ian McFarlan said 717 days ago:

That’s a gorgeous typeface, great execution Jon!

No.6

David Horn said 717 days ago:

oooh – that’s a lovely logo. Great work.

No.7

Fernando Mateus said 717 days ago:

I love the pixelated logo and the colors :-)

I don´t like the type treatment you did for this logo (but I like the font). :-(

It seems to me that there is a gap between the ‘r’ and the ‘o’, even if I can see that you allready closed the dot gap in the ‘r’ character.

But when I almost closed my eyes, I saw that gap, and it is strange. It’s like a logo with two parts: the ‘mir’ and the ‘o’.

Anyway, since this is my first comment on your site, and I read it for ages, I like to thank you for all the momments of inspiration and good reading that I get in here. Keep the good work.

No.8

Luke Andrews said 717 days ago:

Paul D, “miro” means “I watch” in Spanish.

No.9

Matt Wilcox said 717 days ago:

Nice logo Jon. I’ve been giving some critique on the new Miro site after being invited to see it in ‘behind the scenes’ form. I had mentioned how much I liked the new logo, and am pleasantly surprised to discover it was your work!

As for Miro/Democracy – couldn’t agree more, it’s a great application, and has a great team behind it too.

No.10

Maniquí said 717 days ago:

Very nice logo!
It looks like half of an eyeglass or maybe a super-hero eye.

About the “m”, it looks very similar to the one in the Crystal Radio Kit font

I love that font and I’ve used it in this logo and it was the basic shape to create the elephant shape (why the M becomes an elephant is a short history about that company).
(BTW, I’m not a graphic designer at all, as you may notice)

Best regards from a TxP fella!

No.11

Filosof said 717 days ago:

I agree with Fernando Mateus – there’s too much space between R and O… but anyway – can you tell us why the logo looks like this? (that means to reveal the research process)..

No.12

Matt Munsey said 717 days ago:

Very nice work, Jon. I really like how you handled the colors in the pixels. Just the right amount of contrast, but not so much that it starts to look busy. The balance is perfect.

I am afraid I do agree about the “r” and “o” needing to be a little tighter. It’s not a huge thing though.

No.13

Parth said 717 days ago:

Hey, real beautiful logo…greatly executed. Liked the pixeleted look. Although the typeface is great, I also felt like the spacing between r & o is bit extra,and that kind of divides the logo into two. Reading through the other comments, I realized the logo resembles an eye…and miro already means “ I watch”…so I was just thinking, instead of the m in that logo…if you put the last ‘o’ into that…it would actually look like an eye. Hey…just kidding. :) Nice work.

No.14

Paul Kim said 717 days ago:

Inspired work, Jon. I had a preview of this a few weeks back and was not at all surprised to find out you’d designed it.

No.15

Lowell said 717 days ago:

Amazing work. I really love how you went with a dynamic eye shape instead of using a cliched form of an eye.

No.16

Jon Hicks said 717 days ago:

Hey everyone – good point about the R and O spacing – you know how when you’re so close to a project that you can’t see even really obvious things that wrong?!!

No.17

Greg said 717 days ago:

How well does the logo portion scale with size? I would like to see an example of what the whole logo looks like at a small size. It might essentially look pink on the top half and purple on the bottom. Is this intended?

No.18

Pete B said 717 days ago:

I really like the logo. That font and the pixelated effect

No.19

Jay Tillery said 716 days ago:

It’s not that great. Could be better. Doesn’t grab me.

No.20

Dat Nguyen said 716 days ago:

Dang it man, another one of your icons to frequent my dock! No seriously, I saw the logo yesterday and thought it was brilliant. It struck me because it’s rare to see a pattern like that work well in a logo format. The compression pattern captures the spirit of quick Internet videos and Democracy really well. That and the fact that the “m” reminded me of the old mozilla logo (around release m14 or something which I’m partial to) also helped.

No.21

Lucian Marin said 716 days ago:

The shape looks more like a heart rather than an eye, but maybe it’s just me.

No.22

Dave Foy said 716 days ago:

Hands down nicest icon in my dock – lovely stuff Jon!

No.23

kevadamson said 716 days ago:

Sweet logo John. Think I agree with the kerning comment, but the icon rocks. Have you tried the word ‘miro’ a little smaller (and perhaps not bold?) under the icon? Referencing your sample above: say 120px wide and 35px of spacing from the bottom of the icon??

No.24

Stéphane said 716 days ago:

Absolutely brilliant work. I hadn’t heard about Democracy Player until I read the news about Miro’s release this morning. As I visited the new website I thought to myself, what a wonderful identity and logo it had. I can’t say I was surprised when your post popped up in my aggregator, revealing that you were behind this.

The depth that this logo/name carries is just beautiful. Miro of course being derived from the French root, “mirer” (to see), but also suggesting the famous artist Joan Miró, whose palette seems to be described in the logo by pixels or many small screens – delivering content to the eye (itself denoted by the shape of the logo).

My hat is off to you!

No.25

mk said 716 days ago:

The icon is look great. I’m your fan now, Jon.

No.26

Jonathan E said 716 days ago:

I really love the icon work here Jon. Great job (as always)!

No.27

Rutger said 716 days ago:

Now this is getting silly. My dock is totally taken over with Hicks’ icons!
Great work Jon, as always :)

No.28

Kenneth Sundqvist (Evil Oatmeal) said 716 days ago:

Not really feeling this one, sadly.
The leafy shape doesn’t compliment the font very well. And the colours in the mosaic feels completely random, like they came from a Noise+Pixelate effect, or such. The ice blue on the inset M is completely out of it and pulls the purple, which otherwise would have worked all right, down with it.

And as so many have pointed out before me, the word-shape is not flattering with the R+O deal. Also I feel that the R looses familiarity with the rest of the font only to mimic the dot over the I. Also, what is up with the name placement to the shape logo? Looks very much like two separate images just placed on the baseline after the other.

I hope the critique is not too harsh. :)

No.29

Jon Hicks said 716 days ago:

Usually I close comments on any “Recent Work” posts, for the simple reason that these aren’t items up for discussion – they’ve happened, they’re done. Any critique of the work can’t bear in mind the process between the designer and client, and especially the clients requirements. In this situation – what do base a critique on?

This time I forgot to close comments, and once thats done it feels like I can’t really go back and close them easily. This isn’t up for debate – merely for information, that’s all.

What I will say is that this has been one of the toughest identities to finalise. 13 iterations in all, with a lot of different ideas going back and forth. It took a long time, but what’s important for me is that the client got what they wanted.