Tarsnap logo contest

[Colin Percival <cperciva@tarsnap.com>]

Hi Tarsnap users,

Tarsnap needs a logo.  Some people think that it has needed a logo for a long
time, but I've decided this need is now urgent: As of an hour ago, Tarsnap is
a Silver sponsor of the FreeBSD Foundation, and this means their donors list
will include a logo instead of just a name... or rather, would if Tarsnap had
a logo.

I'm completely useless at anything artistic, so I'm hoping a Tarsnap user can
come up with something good.  Consequently, I'm launching today a Tarsnap logo
contest, ending on October 31st.  If you submit a logo which I decide to use,
you win $500.  In the event that nobody submits a logo I like, I'll take the
$500 and launch this as a contest on 99designs.com; but they take a large
commission, so I'd prefer to pay someone directly, and I figure that Tarsnap
users are more likely to know what Tarsnap is all about than random artists on
99designs.

I'm looking for a logo which I can use:
* In the top left corner of the Tarsnap website,
* As a favicon for the website,
* On the @tarsnap twitter account, and
* As a 128 x 128 or smaller logo to put onto the FreeBSD Foundation donors
page (and for any other open source projects Tarsnap sponsors).

Obviously these images don't need to be identical; if the logo contains a
graphic plus the text "Tarsnap", the favicon might be the graphic alone, for
example.  I think for most or all purposes all I'd want to have is a PNG, but
you get bonus points if you can provide something scalable and tell me how to
create PNGs from it on-demand.

I have no idea what a good Tarsnap logo would look like; it might be graphical,
it might just be a typesetting of "Tarsnap", or it might be something I can't
even imagine yet.  It should be consistent with the characteristics of Tarsnap,
however; think "secure", "reliable", "serious", "unix" rather than "colourful",
"fun", "web 2.0", "social", etc.

Feel free to discuss this on the list, or to email me if you have any questions.
I look forward to seeing what people come up with!

-- 
Colin Percival
Security Officer Emeritus, FreeBSD | The power to serve
Founder, Tarsnap | www.tarsnap.com | Online backups for the truly paranoid