Show HN: Free Company Logo API(blog.clearbit.com) |
Show HN: Free Company Logo API(blog.clearbit.com) |
I made a little hubot script for this: https://www.npmjs.com/package/hubot-logo
Use it like this: hubot logo stripe.com
1. Open-source solutions like KONG (https://github.com/mashape/kong) or similar?
2. Built in house?
3. Commercial services such as Apigee, Mashery?
There's maybe some value in the logo owner being able to get information on who's using their logo (service not yet provided).
From the logo-consumer standpoint, it's pretty cool, though, it would be difficult to know if the logo is current enough.
I tried different logos, and I find a few issues:
https://logo.clearbit.com/mcdonalds.com?size=256
Mcdonalds US logo background should be red (http://www.aboutmcdonalds.com/mcd/newsroom/image_and_video_l... )
https://logo.clearbit.com/bk.com?size=256
The quality of that one is bad. Wikipedia's one is a .svg : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Burger_King_Logo.svg
As for the McDonalds logo, I suspect the turquoise is because that's the current background colour of mcdonalds.com
I'm envisaging scraping colours and fonts from the target domain to recreate a text-only logo.
There are parts of any expertise that are formulaic, and by using the word "parts" I'm being generous to humankind.
Should systems/ops folks be 'offended' that PaaS are becoming the default choice for new projects?
If you DO think they should be offended, then I think you're flat wrong. Being offended by commoditisation is like being angry at entropy, or enraged by gravity.
If you DON'T think they should be offended; why not? Does their job not require thought, or creativity? I'd answer that one carefully if I were you ;)
2) If it isn't I can rapidly prototype my basic ideas and take them to a designer. This is excellent and I'd embrace this as a designer.
The product is still in alpha, but it's amazing how many similarities we came to with the URL scheme design. For example, image embedding:
https://img.ogol.io/<domain.com> example: https://img.ogol.io/ogol.io
we also support downloading
https://dl.ogol.io/<domain.com> example: https://dl.ogol.io/ogol.io
Each logo also has it's own page to make working with the asset outside of an API easy.
https://ogol.io/ogol.io/nn0ymd
Our approach requires companies to confirm their domains and associate a vector logo with the domain. Your strategy obviously provides a lot of logos right out of the gates. Logos are such a pain to deal with, it's great to see the problem being attacked from a few different angles.
0. Change at one place, make it work everywhere. (consistent branding across the wild web).
1. Upload your company logo here with us.
2. Multiple versions.
3. Multiple sizes.
4. Control and Connect various sizes, versions with your various social accounts, newsletters, anything.
5. IFTTT support.
6. Get it printed on swag and merchandise.
7. More...?
Better idea:
1. Take sheet of paper
2. Write down where you use your logo
I wouldn't pay for something like that either. I was suggesting it be offered for free, like gravtaar.
The question is: how much?
Nothing about this API requires handing over more than the bare minimum of information (which domains you want logos for). How could they be expected to implement it without that information?
For this service, if it can find an image, it's at least an image the site owner wanted to be used to represent it.
<meta property="og:image" content="//nebula.wsimg.com/7cdaeb9fbb87f3450dc65108e6d6af87?AccessKeyId=6E4E9B5CC8D37F66F76C&disposition=0&alloworigin=1">
This is pretty sweet. Nice job! Is there a post where you talk about the tech behind this API? I've been working on a simple API that finds domain names from company names that I use on projects where I use business intelligence APIs like Clearbit and FullContact.
https://logo.clearbit.com/spacex.com https://twitter.com/spacex
Maybe other fallbacks, too?
When I saw the tagline "Business Intelligence APIs" at the top of the posted link, I totally thought Clearbit's line of business was something completely different-- more along the lines of data warehousing, analytics and reporting.
Or at least, I feel that would be the case.
<meta property="og:image" content="http://www.exxon.com/assets/imgs/en-us/energy-live-here-facebook.jpg">https://github.com/c0dr/LogoParser
It worked okay for like 40% of the sites, and for the rest of the sites we used Python and scikit-learn to detect the logo from the page (threw all images of the page in the script and it returned if it was a logo or not). And this actually worked quite good, irrc over 90% of the test cases worked.
https://github.com/tomsrocket/image-classification
But yeah, using Twitter as a source might also be a good idea.
You can also pass us the following optional query parameters.
Parameter Default Description
size 128 integer Image size: Length of longest side, in pixels
format "png" string File format, either "png" or "jpg"
greyscale (not passed) boolean If this parameter is passed, image will be desaturatedAny thoughts anyone?
http://www.cs.indiana.edu/pub/faces/picons/
If you've ever noticed the little logos on Gmane posts, they come from Picons and favicons.
https://logo.clearbit.com/h5mag.com from... <img class="logo" src="/img/h5mag-logo.svg" alt="logo H5mag">
Google does something similar for extracting favicons for any domain, such as https://plus.google.com/_/favicon?domain=github.com
https://logo.clearbit.com/alexa.com?size=512
Ideally all your logos should be in vector and rendered to any size (or at least powers of 2 for easier caching).
If you want to preserve user privacy, you should definitely proxy this API.
That, and it also doesn't match their favicon.
1. It degrades design as a profession. It's essentially saying that logo design can be done by an algorithm. "There's no creativity to it". Wouldn't you be offended if someone said a basic algorithm could eliminate your job? (perhaps you wouldn't)
2. It's an overly simplistic view of what a logo/brand identity is. You can't just pick out some basic shapes and text for your logo. You need color theory, contrast analysis, a brand strategy, a well developed concept, etc.
Of course not. In fact, I spend quite a large portion of my time automating most of my work, so I can do other, more interesting things.
Besides, if a company looked for and used a "free logo generator", would that company really be the type of client you wanted to pick up?
Of course not. That still doesn't mean that the sentiment isn't degrading to designers. (it is)
- Leonard McCoy
Google's Mathias Duarte advocated as such at UXPA last year in his keynote.
Think about it this way - design trends are just manifestations of a particular temporal affinity towards one aesthetic or another. Machines can measure this and expound as well as react to it at a much faster scale than the human mind can.
Design isn't art. There are way too many designers out there who think it is. Art is art. Design is about solving problems. You can and totally should automate as much of that as possible.
If there's anything less scientific than the material design docs I want you to send it to me. Design hinges on aesthetics. You can't just ignore it (well you can, but you might end up with something that looks like material design).
I was a software developer for many years, and I've seen hundreds of claims for software to automate (in one guise or other) that job, replacing the need for coders.
None of these claims offended me. The vast majority have been comically useless. The rest have just helped remove some dull bit of grunt work out of the job, allowing me to focus on something more valuable.
I would argue it's hubris to think one brain could forever outperform the cumulative experience and information that we can automate.
Consider the hidden arrow in the "Ex" of FedEx, when they rebranded from "Federal Express"; the rational propeller of BMW; even something as simple as the Burger King logo being sandwiched in a hamburger bun. Granted, logo design is just one small corner of design in general, but algorithmically generated logos do indeed result in a herd of swooshes, globes, and rings orbiting bold text (notwithstanding the similar designs of many humans who fail to recruit sufficient creativity or inspiration). Some of these can even be aesthetically pleasing, but it's so much better when a logo is retrospectively obvious and actually means something.
It's the same as a software engineer being offended that a free website generator exists.
Also, offended? It's like photographers getting upset over people giving stuff away, or the influx of rather good amateurs killing their market.
I'm just checking out Tailor Brands, and I can say with certainty the output is similar to what I've seen professional designers offer, on occasion.
Random mutation and A/B would surely take millenia, even assuming huge traffic in the first place. And even then, one of the internal criticisms of A/B at Amazon was that it helped refine local optima (e.g. a next button in a checkout cart) but is weak on a holistic view (whole page, user experience), and making larger innovative jumps (which is where you end up getting swallowed by your competition of course).
Of course, you could just think of a seasoned creative as a really powerful software/hardware combo, with AI and heuristics light years ahead, and cheap at the price.
Maybe let the entity decide for themselves what they want?
Hey, some of my best friends are basic algorithms!
Its the difference between Picasso's line drawings and a child's scribble, the difference between a maguro and otoro cut of tuna, the difference between a script kiddy's work and the sophistication of stuxnet. To a laymen they are the pretty much indistinguishable. But for those who have the experience to know the difference, suggesting the two are equivalent is fairly ridiculous.
Maybe you'd like to address his/her points instead of creating strawmen?
When people, and even entire communities, define themselves by the job they do, they often end up feeling degraded and worthless as the jobs are replaced.
Doesn't mean that the automation shouldn't happen. But that sense of degradation is real for some people.
Do you think that what's out there already could serve as a fairly good starting place? Run them past users to work out which out of thousands of logos are effective. Then isolate components (marks, text, etc) and test those, plus random combinations of the same.
I can appreciate the value in very high level brand creation, but I also think you can get 90% of the way there at 1% of the budget for many businesses. A remotely competent designer can slap down a shape and choose a font for the text and beat half the small business logos out there in a few minutes.
1. You don't have the users to test yet.
2. This is what really makes it untenable - what is the logo for, what does effective mean, 90% of where? This is why brand creation is expensive as hell. There's a lot of work involved and by definition it is bespoke and without shortcuts. That's the whole point or it wouldn't be brand creation in any sense. When you see a logotype, it's just the tip of the iceberg.
I suspect that a lot of people might think of branding as including these cheap services where an underpaid young offshore photoshop whizz throws together an infinity symbol, dolphin, or generic swoosh and even goes so far as to hand kern some text (and bear in mind that even this kind of junior typographic task can't be automated yet).
I would argue that this isn't a ghetto version of the kind of branding that a large company does, but a cargo cult version. The logotype part is highly visible but is the tiniest component of branding - it is superficial and meaningless in isolation. Very much unlike this process, real branding is about discovering and generating an extremely high input of info and ideas and turning this into a very small and focused output, articulating the essence. (And of course a big part of the cost for a large org is that you often need to cover things like web, print, letterheads, reports, sides of trucks, and so on. All whilst maintaining brand consistency.)
Assuming you can't afford to pay for full branding, I think the best solution is to do just enough (e.g. many here might just need something for digital and business cards) and for it to be done by someone close to the company owner of even the owner themselves, as they will live and breathe what the company is for and what makes it distinct. Even poorly executed, this will communicate a much clearer story and have real value imo (trying to avoid the word authentic here but it's probably applicable).
> Developers should avoid writing code by hand and instead write abstract high-level programs that generate code. This rule aims to reduce human errors and save time.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy#Eric_Raymond.E...
I think your perspective is interesting. Wrong, but interesting and probably shared by many others in various fields.