Defining Ubiquity

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I love how the Ubiquity logo is being designed. It’s genuinely open, attracts more people to the community and generates a lot of buzz. But I can’t bring myself to like any of the proposed logos. As Mike Beltzner put it here,

My feeling is that Ubiquity is an emotional, conceptual thing more than it is a set of concepts that can be represented by verbs. To me, that implies a more emotional and conceptual logo than one that represents some set of real world objects.

I couldn’t agree more. The beautiful thing about logos is that they don’t have to mean anything. Of course, they have to symbolize a concept but that connection does not have to be immediately obvious. Take a look at logos of two of the software most similar to Ubiquity, Enso and Quicksilver:

The Enso logo looks like a simple painted circle but it’s actually an important concept in Zen Buddhism (and Japanese calligraphy). “It symbolizes enlightenment, strength, elegance, the universe, and the void”. It has no physical connection to Enso the software. But there’s a strong conceptual link. Enso is definitely one of the most elegant pieces of software written for Windows.

The Quicksilver icon is based on the alchemical symbol for mercury. In other ways too (its builds are named Alchemy), Quicksilver seems to be strongly associated with alchemy. Alchemy is a word derived from Arabic al-kimia that literally means “the art of transformation”. And that makes sense because, as anyone who uses it will tell you, Quicksilver is indeed a magical, life-changing piece of software. 

More than the logo, I like the quote on their About window.

Wu wei is the Taoist concept that these words express. The wikipedia entry is worth a read.

My point

When designing a logo for something like Ubiquity, it’s better to read about the philosophical ideas behind the software (like Enso & Wu Wei) rather than look at the source code or screenshots of Ubiquity.

Or watch this wonderful talk by Kevin Kelly where he describes the Internet as a single machine composed of billions of  brains and trillions of eyes.

It’s not very useful to find ubiquitious objects or sketch more of those overused globes. Because, ironically, we don’t want a ubiquitous logo. We want something totally unique. Perhaps, trying to define Ubiquity will also help.

A definition

Here’s my attempt:

With Ubiquity, you hit two keys on your keyboard and then, you tell it what you want to do. As simple as that. Because it’s so natural, as you constantly use it, it becomes a part of you, an involuntary act that you longer need to think about. All of a sudden, a news article written in five different languages is clearly understood without effort. A dictionary fits into your neocortex without memorization. An unknown name turns into a familiar face. Ubiquity does all the heavy lifting − the translation, the Wikipedia lookup, the mapping. Eventually, all the world’s knowledge resides in your fingers and retrieving that wealth of information seems like a reflex action. It’s the extension of a man’s mind, the slow but inevitable fusion of the brain and the computer.

What’s your definition?

P.S. 

Or if you’re having one of these moments, you can just think of Ubiquity as a command line for Firefox.

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Filed under Programming

Tags: definition, design, enso, icon, logo, Philosophy, quicksilver, ubiquity, zen