Created by T. Joseph Carter
This is the story of one man's bold quest to fix it later. :D
The first thing you need to know is that I hate what Inkscape spits out for SVG files. The XML is largely write-only, and it strangely mixes relative and absolute coordinates. It's a mess, I don't like it, and I'm not very proficient with it anyway. It helps that I have some background in OpenGL graphics and a long history of drawing XPM graphis by hand using the trusty vim text editor. :) Those of you who know that I'm legally blind can probably appreciate my amusement at the look on people's faces when I tell them these things.
This image started with graph paper, a circle template, and me "eyeballing" the December 2012 Raspberry Pi logo [found on Wikipedia][rpi-logo]. The graph paper helped me quickly type the circles into the SVG file, but the end result was just an outline lacking the leaves from the original. My fiancee told me it looked more like grapes than a raspberry. It did--I'd fix it later.
I joined all the circles into a single path in Inkscape and used the XML editor to grab the "d" of the path to put into my hand-made file. I split the path nodes up for easier reading and reloaded the file to make sure it still worked. Then I set about tweaking the XML bit by bit with a calculator to stretch the circles out and make the result look more raspberry-ish. This worked, but I had to recalculate almost every single node by hand. Slowww! But like I said, no proficiency with Inkscape, so I didn't know how to do it right.
Then I dropped white circles on top of it and again turned these into paths I could stretch and reshape as above. It was at this point I tried to reduce precision on the nodes of the "berry bits" to reduce filesize. Introduced some flaws this way, but you only saw them at high res, and at this point I still needed just a tiny icon for GitHub--I'd fix it later.
It was then I discovered two problems:
- Despite trying to make something inspired by, but obviously not the RPi logo, by removing the "grapiness" I'd all but recreated their logo without the leaf in black and white.
- The leaf was necessary, and all my attempts to draw one had failed.
Given the first problem was already an issue, I cheated to solve the second: Loaded the RPi logo and zoomed in on the leaves at the bottom of the screen and superimposed a grid. On the top, I opened the XML file and started writing a path object by hand using linetos to make a sawtooth leaf fill. Opened that in Inkscape and of course it looked terrible. Solved by new understanding of the smoothing tools! But now it looked even more like the RPi logo--I'd fix it later.
I decided to solve this by carving a chunk out of the berry and painting it with the colors of the 1970s rainbow Apple Computer logo. Using one company's former trade tress to help me avoid infringing another company's current trade dress. What was I thinking? Except that the result would be a nice homage to both companies for a project that bridges their products.
The color looked great with a mod to the leaves, except I didn't have any desire to re-calculate all of those nodes to modify the paths just then--I'd fix it later.
I showed what I had to the #a2c.chat IRC channel and Tony Diaz reacted to my proud work simply by saying, "Take a bite out of it!" Craaaaaaap.
I did that eventually, and while I was working on the logo for a2server I learned enough Inkscape tricks to actually clean it up to be the image you see now. And that's when I decided it should go into version control.
The result is the file you see here.