The Backstory (2020)

For many years, the question of what is or is not Perl's logo has been quite murky. There is a fair amount of backstory and there is too much to dive into right here, but I will happily point you at Neil Bowers' tackling of the subject from 4 years ago: https://neilb.org/2020/12/04/perl-and-camels.html It's a quick, but informative read. I encourage you to take a peek.

The TL;DR of it all is that Neil suggested:

• 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 would be to create a logo that represents not just the language but also the community, one that feels friendly and welcoming.
• He acknowledged that the "camel association" will always be tied to Perl, even if a new logo is chosen, but suggested this as a pragmatic approach

The Perl Toolchain Summit (2024)

At the Perl Toolchain Summit in Lisbon this year, a small group of us had a chat about the logo (or non-logo) situation. The majority opinion was that someone should come up with a logo and present it for community use. Neil Bowers and I were nominated to take this on. Over the summer, Neil commissioned Zach Roszczewski to come up with a new camel. Babs Veloso, Neil and I gave some initial feedback. After we were happy that we could proceed, we widened the circle of participants to a small, shadowy cabal, chatting on TPRF Slack. Among these were Sébastien Feugère and Thibault Duponchelle, who had previous wrestled with the logo topic. Later, I participated in a call with the PSC, where they gave some feedback on the logo. When I was at the London Perl and Raku Workshop this past October, Sébastien, Thibault, Leo Lapworth and I got in a room together to discuss a path forward. We aimed to have a logo available for announcement as part of the Perl Advent Calendar, and here we are.

Over the past week, we have polled various others for opinions on the logo and various versions of it. The result of all of this is the logo you see at the top of this article.

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 License

The license for this logo is CC-BY. That means that you are free to create derivative works based on the logo, with the only condition being attribution. We would love for this logo to be used widely, so we wanted to go with a permissive license.

Who Put You in Charge?

Nobody. In the absence of a benevolent dictator or a governing body for all of the Perl communities, nobody has a mandate to create a logo for the Perl language and all of the communities attached to it. Our only hope is that this logo is seen as a gift and that if you like it, you will use it.

Traditionally the way that things work in our communities is that someone creates something in the hopes that it will be adopted by others. That may or may not happen, but the end result is entirely up to the various Perl communities. We hope that you like this logo. We hope that you use it. We are happy to work with you on using it, but we are not in charge of anything and it would be disingenuous to pretend it were otherwise.

What About The Perl and Raku Foundation?

This logo is not affiliated with The Perl and Raku Foundation in any way. The foundation has its own logo (the onion), which can also be used under certain conditions. As far as I can tell, there is no appetite within the foundation to wade into the Perl logo debate. Having said that, an onion is not a camel, and I refer you to Neil's blog post quoted above for an argument about why the logo really should just be a camel.

Where Can I Get a Copy of the Logo?

The logo currently lives in the metacpan/perl-assets repository. The repo is still a work in progress, but this is where you should be able to find static assets moving forward.

Where Can I Give Feedback?

Please open an issue if there's something you'd like to discuss. Items worth discussing are:

• minor changes to the logo layout and look
• general issues related to using the logo
• offers of help

Items not currently worth discussing:

• this should be something other than a camel
• this requires a ground up redesign
• I hate it

Are There Other Options?

Yes, we would like you to have many different options when it comes to using the camel. I'm including some of them below.

Who Owns this Logo?

Neil Bowers was the initial owner of the new camel. He has transferred the ownership of the original camel artwork to me. My preference would be to transfer ownership to MetaCPAN, but it's not a legal entity, so I'm not entirely sure if that is possible. Since the license is CC-BY, I don't actually know how much ownership matters, but for the time being, I am the camel's steward.

What's Next?

We consider the logo to be production ready, but also a work in progress. We are in the process of approaching stakeholders and speaking to them about integrating the logo. In addition this, I expect the logo to be used in some way on both perl.com and metacpan.org.

There are still some assets which need to be settled -- like a favicon.ico, but if all goes well that should be taken care of in the very near future.

It is my hope that the various Perl communities can standardize on this logo in the near term. This doesn't have to be the forever logo for Perl, but just generally getting people on the same page would be an excellent start.

If you think this logo is a good fit, please accept it as our gift to you. If it's not a good fit for you, that's ok too. TIMTOWTDI!