Shlomi Fish’s Art : Linux Slogan: “Linux - Because software problems should not cost money”.

In the Technion, we hold a Linux installation party twice a year. The first one in which I took an active part was that of Winter 97/98. One of the things I wanted to do in preparation for it was to prepare a slogan, as well as a graphical banner representing it.

One day my father, my sister and I were driving in our car, when I told him that I seek such a slogan that will tell people how Linux is free and that a lot of the software for it is also free. Eventually my father suggested “Linux: Free software - Free aggravations.”. I said that it had the right direction but lacked the final touch. After some thought, I came up with “Linux - Because software problems should not cost money”.

Thus, I set out to prepare the banner. First the “Linux” part. I used the Long Island font, which was present on our hard-disk at the time. It isn’t bundled with Corel-Draw 4.0 so I don’t know how we got it. Maybe out of Print Shop. In any case, that’s not too critical as any heavyweight serif font will do.

The “i” was singularly converted to the font “Bodoni Bd BT”, which, as far as I recall, is shipped with Corel-Draw. The reason for it was to resemble the “i” of Intel, which is a common practise in drawing a Linux logo. A nice feature of Corel-Draw is that one can use the “manipulate” toolbar tool to change the properties or location of individual letters in a text.

The finalised “Linux” inscription was filled with a Corel-Draw texture. The texture is sky 3 colours with the colours of Light green as sky, light pale purple as atmosphere and white as clouds. The texture number is 4 and the softness is 50%.

In order to fill the slogan, I first created a pattern. A pattern is a Corel-Draw image that can be used to fill another image. The pattern I prepared had a black background, with one horizontal strip filled with a horizontal blue gradient. At first I considered green, but my father said it should be blue and I think he was right.

After the pattern was created, I created the two lines of the slogan. Each line was a separate object, so the pattern would be aligned in the same place of the letters. The font is called “Denmark”, and it also does not come with Corel-Draw 4.0. I did not italicise it - the font comes slanted. I had to tweak the parameters of the pattern fill a little, so it will come out in just the right place. After it was properly applied to the upper line, I applied it to the bottom line in the same way using the “Copy Attributes” function.

Afterwards, I added the background, which is a plain fill coloured Olive Yellow-Green. By the way, my father thought that adding a background was a bad idea, and that I should keep it white. But my sister and I didn’t think so.

I even prepared a T-shirt with the banner. The ironic thing was that even though the banner is about Linux, it was prepared entirely in Windows 95. Oh well, Corel-Draw was not available for Linux at that point in time…

For sources, and different arrangements of this banner, go to its home page.