Lately I have been trying to get out of my dependence on proprietary systems and reduce my financial support of greedflation producing corporations. Increasingly it has felt to me that these businesses are exploiting software with platform dependencies to extract massive profits without adding commensurate value. To this end I have increasingly begun testing and using open source software to complete my projects as I am able. I started with LibreOffice a few years back to reduce my reliance on Microsoft products and have been very happy with the transition. It did take a little getting used to at first, but now Microsoft products feel weird to me. With my mission critical daily usage software out of the way, I started looking into replacing some of my more creative but less frequently used programs like Adobe and found several options for Photoshop, my favorite of which are Krita and Gimp. I struggled a little more to find suitable replacements for adobe illustrator but eventually found Inkscape, which I am really liking and finding to be a superior product to illustrator in some ways. For 3D programs I have started to learn Blender and I am still working on finding suitable replacements for Revit. The latest combo I tested was a Blender plugin called BlenderBIM but I haven’t been able to do what I want to in that software yet. That brings me to FreeCAD.
I have tried FreeCAD in the past for architectural drafting and didn’t really have the time to learn it well enough to evaluate it fairly. After a long pause of going back to my sponsorship of greed, I had a new need for 3d parts design. So, I began using FreeCAD again to create the manufacturing drawings for my Electrical Junction Box invention. While I am still struggling in this venture, I am doing my best to learn this new software. As such I am frequently on the very active FreeCAD Forum looking for answers to my frustrations and questions. That was when I saw the following post.
The old logo (shown above) isn’t all that bad, but I agree that an update could improve the image of the software. Then, an idea popped into my head and I just had to jot down a sketch. I grabbed some paper, a red pen, a blue pen, a whiteout pen, and whiteout tape and quickly sketched my idea down before it slipped away into oblivion.
I felt pretty good about the sketch so I figured I would bring this into the computer and refine it a bit more. The sketch didn’t really convey the dimensional depth I was going for. I looked around on the DuckDuckGo search engine for some images that I might be able to use as a base for my logo and among many found the following that I felt I could use most easily and quickly to create my logo.
This beautiful red bike came from a post on Pinterest from the Harley Davidson Store and appears to be one of their listings or something like that.
The gear came from this interesting image. Unlike most of the other images it had the angle I was going for and enough of the gear left visible. This meant I could quickly and easily modify it for the FreeCAD logo. With a little bit of work on Krita, I was able to edit the images and compose them into the following .png image to be used as a basis for the final logo.
I showed this image to my good friend Joaquin who provided some very valuable feedback. A few rounds of Krita-shopping later, I had the image where I wanted it to be and brought it into Inkscape to create the final .svg vector files. After a bit of tinkering with the bitmap trace feature settings, some helpful Reddit critiques on the design, and more critical feedback from Joaquin, I achieved the following logo design. There is always room for improvement and maybe a few more things I want to tweak but I feel satisfied with the result and I am ready to move on with my life now.
But, I was not done yet! The second to last step for me was to place this logo into the template file provided by the organizer. This template was very useful to make sure the logo will work in a variety of screen contexts.
Then, I uploaded the above documentation along with the svg file which can be found in the following link. https://forum.freecad.org/viewtopic.php?p=749385 Now, all that is left to do is to wait for the community to vote on the final result. If you are reading this before April 14th of 2024, please go online to see all the other logo designs and keep track of any news for the voting. If you like my design best please vote for it!