The “Tw” abbreviation may be useful as a narrower marker to complement the full name. It is probably too abstract to be used without the “CUTwC” logo providing context, but unlike the other designs it is clearly derived from the full “CUTwC” version.

The “pot made of winks” logo is a more abstract design, relies on colour, and particularly only has a CUTwC connection if combined with a Cambridge Blue glow — the “realistic” version is also pixel art, which can be practically inconvenient. It conveniently doubles as a “layered” image as a mild visual pun for the home page link of the web site, and it’s a more convenient logo shape than some alternatives; it also has enough detail for large viewing while being identifiable at very small scale (e.g. as a favicon).

So long as full colour is available, the Pot-of-Winks is a recommended option in situations where an abstract logo is appropriate, and in particular where a square aspect logo is needed.

POVRay source for the ray-traced images is available, along with the bash script that uses it to generate all the variants. Note that the half-toned versions rely on thresholds.xml being in $HOME/.magick. For the obsessively interested, these thresholds are generated from makedither.c.

Regarding sizes:

The nature of the design means that different variants will be suitable for different uses.
Please try to use a minimum of 16×16 pixels (preferably 24×24) or 1cm height (whichever is larger) to preserve visible detail unless the image is used to complement/echo a larger version of the logo (e.g. as custom bullet points where a larger logo on the same page explains the small blurry image).

The pixel art approach means file size vary with the amount of detail; small files are pixellated/blurry when enlarged, and detailed versions are large files. Please try to pick a suitable resolution — the web site banner picks adaptively, for example.

Regarding the glow:

Part of image

The glow effect is actually part of the image itself, using transparency. This has some disadvantages, but is likely the most flexible.

Space left in image

There is no glow in the image, but the image has enough padding (roughly \ 20% compared with the size of the winks) to include it. A suitable CSS filter for adding the glow is shown for the square designs with transparent formats.

Tightly cropped

There is no glow in the image, and the actual pot fills the image area. A suitable CSS filter for adding the glow (outside the image) in HTML is shown for the square designs with transparent formats. This crop means some of the image sizes differ from the other two cases. This approach means the glow can overlap other page elements, which enlarges the logo proper compared with the space it takes up.

The CSS filter behaviour is not 100% consistent across implementations, but can be useful for integrating with other design features.

The blue is one official definition of Cambridge Blue. There have been several, re-rendering will take several hours, and the result may be less bright, so efforts to keep up with the latest whim have been limited.

See the half-tone versions if the glow effect is desirable but there is no support for partial transparency (which may be the case, for example, when printing on a T-shirt or other merchandise).

Regarding the dark vs light backgrounds:

The eye adapts to the surrounding colour; this means that the same design may look too light or too dark depending on what it is presented on. For this reason there are two variations of the designs, with a lighter version (strictly a different gamma curve) used where the background is expected to be a light colour.

The file formats with solid backgrounds have an appropriate winks mat design for the requested background colour; for file formats with clear backgrounds the light vs dark setting only affects the winks.

Regarding monochrome

The monochrome versions use the same shade of grey for all of the winks, since a direct conversion from colour can look a little strange out of context. Note that this also affects the colour of a glow that’s part of the image (but not glow added as a rendering style). The monochrome versions are expected to be used for printing, so desktop backdrops are not available in monochrome.

Regarding file formats

PNG is a widely-supported lossless image format which includes support for transparency, which allows the logo to blend with whatever background is available.

WebP is a newer format that provides better compression than PNG while retaining the same lossless quality; if your software supports it, this will give you smaller files.

JPEG is a lossy format designed for photographic images, and does not (normally) support transparency. These files have a mat pattern as an opaque background, and are compressed to a smaller size at the cost of some reduction in image quality.

WebP also supports lossy compression, with a better size-to-quality ratio than JPEG. There is therefore also an opaque version of the designs that uses WebP in lossy mode, which will have lower quality than the lossless versions and uses a mat pattern as a background.

Desktop backgrounds

Obviously you want this logo as a desktop backdrop, right?

Four options are available for each supported display resolution, distinguished by whether the display is in landscape or portrait orientation and by whether the image should cover the entire display area or be fully contained within it. Desktop backgrounds are not provided for monochrome mode.

Vector art versions

While the pot of winks works best as a “realistic” image, not all printing processes support a full range of colours. In some cases one of the alternative logos would be a better option, but for consistency of branding, simplified forms are available. Note that, without the colours drawing the connection to winks, the polite objects that the monochrome ones resemble are some designs of bottle stopper or honey dipper, and they resemble... some other objects commonly described as “ribbed”... as well, so please think carefully before using them and ensure that the context is obvious.

The “realistic” versions are hand-drawn to approximate the 3D-rendered version (if you don’t look too closely).

These are all resolution-independent line art without backgrounds; see the PNG generator if you need a specific resolution, and use the “theme” toggle to choose between colours for use on light and dark backgrounds.

Half-toned versions for printing/merchandise (large files)

These use a half-tone pattern for the glow, which may simplify printing (e.g. T-shirts).
The glow is always present; use options above to select monochrome vs colour, light vs dark theme and image format.

The “CUTwC text logo” above has sensible-looking lettering, a clear tiddlywink, and a little bit of a visual pun in the pot effect — it works as a stand-alone design. However, for plain text uses, it is a little tall, and this can be inconvenient; it is also “a logo” of itself, which is distracting as an adjuct to other designs where lettering (with some mild branding) is more important — such as adding a reference to the name of the Club to the Pot-of-Winks or Pot Rampant.

For situations that require wider, plainer wording (such as banners), there is an alternative design based on circles (hence a tenuous tiddlywinks connection); apparently Bauhaus/geometric designs are popular at the moment, too. The coloured version “works” only at larger sizes (like a banner) — it is too visually “busy” otherwise, but adds some visual interest at scale (like graffiti). Other versions work acceptably as text alongside a logo, since their design is more clearly textual and less graphical. Please ensure sufficient contrast (which will depend on size) for the solid logo. Consider the mono logo where an extremely short logo is needed (including inlining a logo in text with a small font), since it is distinguishable at smaller vertical sizes than the pot-of-winks or CUTwC text logos.

For historical interest: This background is arranged to tile in both dimensions by using the coordinates to trace loops in four-dimensional space as an input to a Perlin noise function (with different scales in different dimensions to represent the way a mat is squashed when it is rolled up). The plane was shaded by rendering it on custom ray tracing hardware in the 1990s (possibly the noise function actually perturbed a normal and some lighting was applied, I’ve forgotten), and then “hairs” were drawn on manually and the result heavily compressed. It’s also been tweaked a couple of times to better represent the colour of an actual felt winks mat. Needless to say, it is heavily over-engineered even by the standards of this site.

They might therefore be superior for situations where scanning the QR code might otherwise be tricky due to distortion or blotchiness — T-shirts, pint glasses, tattoos, etc...

“QArt” versions

Note: These are mildly academically interesting because they preserve the error correction of the QR code, rather than some approaches that just splat an image over the code and rely on the error correction to undo the mess.