Rejects
Now that summer’s here, it’s t-shirt weather, and I’m sure there will be many opportunities for you to to wear interesting designs and promote your favourite things, including, perhaps, Julia. Unfortunately, not all t-shirt designs get printed, and there are many ideas that won’t, or shouldn’t, make it into wearable form.
Here are a few rejected Julia-related t-shirt designs that you won’t be wearing this year!
Warning: some of the following might not be very amusing, interesting, or inoffensive.
AI
These two letters appearing together – “a” and “i” – have started to provoke in me a slight case of “irritable vowel syndrome”, because recently they’ve been occurring virtually everywhere and in everything. Visually, though, the iconography and symbology for all the “AI” things I see consists mainly of pictures of brains and electronic circuit diagrams (which date back to World War 2, I think).
However, drawing them by hand is quite tedious. This example was rendered by a few dozen autonomous grid-space agents that George and his team over at JuliaDynamics keep trained up specially for jobs like this.
Periodical
There aren’t any elements in the periodic table that start with the letter “J”, so this is an obvious idea to try.
“Julium” or “Julianium” aren’t good, though. And the number 137 is cool, but unfortunately meaningless. The slogan is a stretch, too.
Carry on
Although dating from 1939, the famous (in the UK at least) Keep Calm and Carry On motivational campaign lives on today.
This image has gradually morphed into irony, particularly with the UK's right wing political party recently proposing a return to compulsory military service. The crown is Henry VIII's, and he was a amoral thug, so I'm not sure the crown is providing much positive energy here.
Helvetica Bold
I've seen many variations of this t-shirt. Here it's the names of the four original founders of Julia:
The original, by Japanese apparel company 2K/Gingham, dates from 2001. The ampersands were originally introduced in order to make the shorter names match better with the longer name. Thus the order of the names is just a function of their length - so Stefan gets the short (well, long) straw here.
Musical interlude
Some musical notation as a change from mathematical notation.
It's impractical to put musical references on a t-shirt. For one thing, not everyone can read musical notation. For another, the music industry is famously litigious about even short musical phrases (here's YouTube's Legal Eagle on the topic), so it would be madness to put the notes of a quite famous (if ancient) hit tune on a t-shirt. Even if lawyers can't all read music, they can afford to pay people who can.
Heart speech
This spin on Milton Glaser’s iconic design here hopes that people would know what “.JL” means.
But it’s probably too much of an over-used cliché to have much appeal.
Memory lane
This is JuliaCoin, an NFT-blockchain-crypto design. Remember these?
I think only one JuliaCoin exists, on my hard drive. I'm not sure about the maths, so either it’s incredibly valuable, or it’s worthless. Wait - 50-50 odds? I feel lucky. To the moon!
Forgotten kingdom
Once upon the time, dinosaurs walked the earth, and dinosaurs were cool.
Also once upon a time, dinosaur movies were cool. But I'm not sure that being associated with dinosaurs or so-so sequels is good marketing.
Luxurious
The Julia package Luxor.jl is 10 years old this year, and the logo is just some ancient-Egyptian beetle in a cartouche, drawn with Luxor.jl.
The trouble with a t-shirt with this design is that only one person would probably be interested in wearing it – and I know for a fact that they never wear t-shirts.
Da Vinci coding
Mr Brown codes.
Chapter 4
Robert Langdon looked thoughtfully at the body of the man on the floor, and then knelt down to look at the design on the t-shirt the corpse was still wearing. The renowned Harvard symbologist placed his fingertips together, and pondered thoughtfully for a minute, as if he was formulating a reply to an uncharacteristically insightful question from one of his students. He slowly circled the body once. Then he turned to his young companion with a confident nod.
“Yes, it’s an ambigram, and we call this particular style a homogram, because of the rotational symmetry. What’s puzzling though...”
The famous professor interrupted himself. He quickly grabbed the corpse’s legs, and swung the body round through half a circle.
“You see, Sophie” - he turned again to address the beautiful young French cryptographer who was still standing next to him - “The strange thing is, that the design appears upside down whichever way round you look at it!”
Sophie gasped with surprise. After a thoughtful pause, she slowly whispered:
“Oui, Robert, peut-être - but surely the design appears the right way up to the person wearing it if they look down at it?”
Langdon shook his powerful head slowly.
“No, I think the corpse must have put on the t-shirt the wrong way round while he was still alive. Otherwise, the only way he would be able to see the design is if he stood with his back to a mirror and looked over his shoulder...”
(not from “The Da Vinci Code” by Dan Brown)
The dark side
The prism creates the Julia colors.
I'm no physicist, but I think the optical behaviour of light in this image is unscientific.
Ummm
This is Sengai's The Univers (from about 1800), drawn with the Luxor.brush() function.
I'm a bit worried about the geometry going on here, as explained by Dr Suzuki:
The circle represents the infinite, and the infinite is at the basis of all beings. But the infinite in itself is formless. We humans endowed with senses and intellect demand tangible forms. Hence a triangle. The triangle is the beginning of all forms. Out of it first comes the square. A square is the triangle doubled. This doubling process goes on infinitely and we have the multitudinosity of things, which the Chinese philosopher calls 'the ten thousand things', that is, the universe. Dr. Daisetz T. Suzuki
Gooooooooooooooal
To the joy of all football (soccer) fans who code in Julia, the JuliaCon 2024 conference is being held at the Philips Stadion, Eindhoven, the home of the PSV Eindhoven football club.
Unfortunately, with this design, everyone would have to share the same shirt number. And in football, all the shirt numbers are significant, being associated with particular players. For example, Ronaldo has 28 and 7 (and 9). Johan Cruyff, 14. David Beckham, 23, Lionel Messi, 30. It would be unfair to any commentators if everyone wore the same 24 shirt.
Hubbub
A nice simple image with a strong, hacker-friendly orange color theme.
However, I think the name has already been taken.
Body image
The three-body problem: I've not read the book or seen the TV series, but I do like Kirk Long's three body problem Mastodon bot.
I’m not a fan of the slogan here. Also, Luxor is really struggling to get a good 3D ‘atmosphere’ (albeit in the vacuum of space), so it’s a task probably more suited for Makie or Blender. Also also, it reminds me of those unsettling scenes in sci-fi movies where unfeasibly huge stars and planets are just hanging in the sky, seemingly without exerting much gravitational influence.
That's enough rejects for now!
[2024-06-03]
