You’re reading Signal vs. Noise, a publication about the web by 37signals since 1999.

@Jamie

What are all the extra light gray circles for?

Just the dark black globe graphic is enough.

The Ball and the Cross.

The gray circles were guides. Where the guides fell into the center circle created the end result as seen in solid black.

@Joe

“The gray circles were guides. Where the guides fell into the center circle created the end result as seen in solid black.”

No way.

How are those gray marks guideline? Look carefully at them. Some of these “guideline” are not even circular, nor oval. They are odd shaped.

It looks more like the gray lines where added in AFTER the dark black globe was drawn.

The guides are not particular,nor oral… They are epileptical

Nice. Reminds me vaguely of constructing an ellipse through concentric circles http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2UYRkFjA_Sw Regards, Des

Out of curiosity, what purpose are the left- and right-most gray circles serving? They don’t intersect with the black, final graphic at all, nor do they intersect with the other guides in a way that suggests they were used to position them. Thanks!

I would quibble with the tropic lines… they should be parallel with the equator. As it is, it looks more like a basketball.

@Joey, I doubt the icon would look good with three parallel horizontal lines.

But now that the source has been offered I think I’ll play with the tropics and try it out for myself.

Well, the lines are // or perpendicular to the equator, on the surface. This naturally should provide some curvature when projected to 2d. You might not buy the curvature (I look at these a lot and they do look a tad off) but the fact that there is curvature is correct.

Yeah, looking closer the halfway line should be halfway up the latitude on the sides too, so it’s a little high (on the upper half)

Just wants to point out that your world graphic is nearly identical to the world bank logo: http://www.cev.washington.edu/files/world-bank-logo.jpg

Looks very similar to the world bank logo

@Colin: If you want non-equatorially-parallel tropic lines, look no further than Pan-Am’s logo

In any case, it’s definitely the most iconic way of representing “the world” in whatever sense (Parallel tropic lines be damned!) Hence, as Ryan points out, the World Bank also uses it. There’s a few dozen other companies that use it too, but Pan-Am was the first to come to mind for me.

wait… wat?

Same as the Apple world logo found in the iOS keyboard (when having more than one language).

Did 37signals steal the logo from the World Bank?

http://data.worldbank.org/

@DHH

Ironic that you freak out about people ripping of Hiserisehq.com yet your own company is ripping of the World Banks logo

whats the best icon for “change language”? maybe a globe?

I too thought “seen that before”. I don’t think it was just The World Bank who used this sort of globe though – I swear a media company used something similar…

reminds me of the ancient BBC logo

@Joel it’s in fact also the logo of Metro, the world’s largest global newspaper. It’s a free daily commuter paper with local editions for many large cities/countries worldwide. http://www.metro.lu