Sean's blog

Political Party Logos – part 3

DAP have a page devoted to an explanation of their logo, as it embodies some of their fundamental principles – more on those later. Again, I copy and paste the bitmapped logo from their website and construct a new one from elements in Inkscape. One of the first things I notice about the DAP logo image is that it’s not entirely symmetrical. I’m guessing it has been hand-drawn and the asymmetry is unintentional. If that’s not the case, then use my version with care: DAP has hidden asymmetry in its core principles!

DAP Rocket 932x2000 pixels

From a flag-design point of view, it’s possibly worth noting that DAP define the background as white, but always seem to present their logo on a white page, so it’s not obvious what size or even shape the background is. I’ll use the limits of the coloured part of the logo, as DAP does in its bitmap image on its website. A few wrinkles in making the image: the body of the rocket is drawn as a rectangle, but converted to a path – another node is added on the top edge to form the ‘nose’. The two fins are slightly different shapes in the bitmap original, they’re now just one triangle and a clone, flipped horizontally. For the rocket boosters, I drew the left-most, and cloned it, so they’re identical too. The page background had to be set to white, opaque. It’s a little bit more complex than the keadilan logo, so the file is slightly larger, but still small compared to a large high-resolution bitmap. Forgot to say earlier – the SVG file will also compress very well – likely to 10% of its plain-text size. DAP Rocket – Plain SVG – use as you please!

The DAP Rocket Symobolism

DAP explain the symbolism in the rocket as follows:

• The blue circle stands for the unity of the multi-racial people of Malaysia.
• The white background stands for purity and incorruptibility.
• The red rocket symbolizes the Party’s aspiration for a modern, dynamic and progressive society.
• The four rocket boosters represent the support and drive given to the Party objectives by the three major races and others. TERRIBLE!

It’s all good, up until the last bit. The blue circle represents racial unity, but the boosters represent 4 discrete groups? Hmmm, I detect some internal tension… I don’t like the rocket boosters explanation at all. Where I come from, no sensible person cares what race a person thinks she is. This is as it should be, in my simple mind, and fits well with the first ‘unity … of Malaysia’. The word ‘major’ also aggravates me. Possibly it’s because the Malaysian government (and many of its people) would assign me to a ‘minor’ race, and I worry about ‘supremacy’ creeping into people’s minds. I think ‘majority’ (as opposed to ‘minority’) race would have been more appropriate. The ‘3’ is no good either – what will DAP do when there are as many Arabs and Africans in Malaysia as there are one of the other ‘majority’ races? It’s no good, any one of those complaints should be enough to do something about the rocket boosters. My suggestion is add one more booster, and you can use them for DAP’s ‘5 basic principles’, as described in the “DAP reaffirms support for PR to establish an alternative government” article on Lim Kit Siang’s blog. The rocket boosters could then be said to represent the 5 principles of freedom, justice, truth, social welfare and universal moral values – the ‘drive’ behind the DAP leadership. That’s it for political logos, I think. Inkscape is perfect for a job like this, and free. The PNG files with the big logos I’ve posted are exported from Inkscape. You can fiddle about with those images with the Gimp, if you wanted to add any visual effects. I was going to construct a Pakatan Rakyat logo, built up from the DAP rocket, the Keadlian crescents and the PAS ‘eye’, and superimpose it onto an image of Barad-dûr – the Dark Tower with Sauron’s eye on top from the ‘Lord of the Rings’ movies, but I leave that as an exercise for the reader.

I’ve added a ‘http://blog.lolyco.com/sean/’ link across the bitmaps because some sites are hotlinking the images. If you want a beautiful bit-mapped image for your own site, download Inkscape and download my SVG file. Open the SVG file with Inkscape and choose ‘Export’ from the File menu. You can choose the dimensions of the image, and you’ll get a beautiful bit-mapped image, in whatever format you like, at whatever size you like. No jagged edges anywhere. Unless you do what one hotlinking site does, and specify the wrong proportions for the image in your HTML, Adxicible. Try specifying width or height, but not both.

Posted in Bolehtics, FOSS | 1 Comment »

Political Party Logos – part 2

Converting a simple bitmapped logo, such as the Parti Keadilan Rakyat logo is not difficult. The first step is to find a good example, and I took the ballot-slip image from the top-right of the PKR website. You can copy and paste the image into a new Inkscape document. The idea is to use the existing image to get the relative dimensions of the scalable (SVG) image about right. Remember that SVG images look just as good at any size, so absolute dimensions are not necessary.

keadilanrakyat.org

To build the logo from rectangles and circles, I used guidelines from the original image. You can drag guidelines out from the side and top rulers, position them at the side, top and bottom edges of all the elements of the keadilan logo. You can now place rectangles and ellipses over the bitmap. Work from the largest rectangle (outer red), through inner blue rectangle, then white ellipse and finally blue circle. The objects will snap to the guidelines. As you draw each object, ‘lower’ it so that it is ‘behind’ the bitmap image you’re working from. You can set the fill colour for each object using the ‘dropper’ tool to match the colours on the original image.

Keadilan image with guidelines

A final step is to use the alignment tool to centre all the objects vertically and horizontally, just in case your guidelines were a little bit out. Tada! Scalable Keadilan logo! I’ve saved the version below as a plain SVG file. I notice Inkscape has bloated the file a little bit with some line style definitions which are not used in the image, but it’s still a very small file. There’s no copyright expressed in the file, nor am I interested in what anybody does with it. Copy it and use it as you will.

Keadilan logo – plain SVG file

Keadilan logo 2000x1004 pixels

I’ve replaced the PNG version of the images with a very low resolution image because of the number of incompetent / leeching Malaysian webs that were hotlinking them. Not only hotlinking, but hotlinking a 2000-pixel wide image to display a 100-pixel wide icon. Brain-dead. Download the SVG file, open it in Inkscape, export it as PNG at the size you want, host it yourself.

Posted in Bolehtics, FOSS | No Comments »

Political Party Logos – part 1

Perhaps the most apparent aspect of a political party, after its most famous or infamous members, is its logo. Logos are spectacularly obvious in Malaysia around election times, as large flags line every street, hanging from bamboo poles planted in the ground, hanging from every building and plastered onto any flat surface. Campaign flags and posters litter the ground for weeks after an election.

PAS logo - 2000x1384 pixels

The Pakatan Rakyat (PR) party logos are simpler than those of the major Barisan Nasional parties. Simplicity can be good. In a country where the three major mother tongues each have their own mutually-unintelligible script, a simple way to distinguish political parties can be vital at election times.

Another good reason why simplicity is important is when people wish to use the logo in their own media. Most of the logos you can find on the Internet for the 3 PR parties are in bitmapped formats. A bitmapped format specifies the colour of each individual dot in the picture – the number of dots making up the picture is fixed when the image is created. The problem comes when the image is resized – the dots are too, becoming smaller (not a problem) or larger rectangles, so that smooth curves become jagged.

DAP Rocket 932x2000 pixels

There is a solution to this problem, and that is to use a scalable format such as SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics). Vector graphics formats don’t specify colours of dots, they are sequences of commands to draw the curves and shapes that make up an image. When you resize a vector graphics image, the larger image is re-drawn at the new size, so it looks just as good as the original.

An additional bonus with vector graphics is that the file size can be really quite small, and remains the same size no matter how big the final image is. With a bitmapped file, if you create a very large image  (say for a poster) with good quality, the file can be enormous. Wikipedia has a bitmapped version of the PAS logo and an SVG version, the SVG file is only about 7% the size of the bitmapped version. It’s not all good news though: in 2009, web browser support for SVG is still patchy – so use them for design and press, but stick with bitmaps for the web for now.

SVG is an open standard – in fact, its file format is plain text, so you can just look and change it by eye, without software at all! PAS are leading the PR partners in IT again, and there is an SVG PAS logo available on the web – I found it at wikipedia. You can see how simple the format is by looking inside the file:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<!-- Generator: Adobe Illustrator 13.0.0,
SVG Export Plug-In .
SVG Version: 6.00 Build 14948)  -->
<!DOCTYPE svg PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD SVG 1.0//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/2001/REC-SVG-20010904/DTD/svg10.dtd">
<svg version="1.0" id="svg2"
xmlns:svg="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg"
xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg"
xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"
x="0px" y="0px" width="647.5px" height="448px"
viewBox="124.75 -5.5 647.5 448"
enable-background="new 124.75 -5.5 647.5 448"
xml:space="preserve">
<rect id="white_background" x="124.5" y="-2.75"
fill="#008900" width="647.5" height="448"/>
<circle fill="#FFFFFF" cx="448.25" cy="221.25" r="156.5"/>
</svg>

Keadilan logo 2000x1004 pixels

The last two lines (starting <rect and <circle) are the ones that draw the PAS logo, the rest is information about the format of the file, and a comment to say the file was generated with Adobe Illustrator. You can pick up a genuine copy of Adobe Illustrator at A-sashi for RM2,400! That’s RM1,200 per SVG command!

Fortunately, there’s no need to edit SVG files by hand, you can also design on the screen using a FOSS (Free Open Source Software) program such as Inkscape. You can download and install Inkscape from inkscape.org on many different operating systems, or just add it from a list, if you’re using a Linux distribution like Ubuntu.

[There seems to be a small problem with the SVG file available at wikipedia, where the logo background doesn’t seem to quite match up with the page. Here’s an SVG file that doesn’t have that issue: PAS logo – plain SVG]

I’ve added a ‘http://blog.lolyco.com/sean/’ link across the bitmaps because some sites are hotlinking the images. If you want a beautiful bit-mapped image for your own site, download Inkscape and download my SVG file. Open the SVG file with Inkscape and choose ‘Export’ from the File menu. You can choose the dimensions of the image, and you’ll get a beautiful bit-mapped image, in whatever format you like, at whatever size you like. No jagged edges anywhere. Unless you do what one hotlinking site does, and specify the wrong proportions for the image in your HTML, Adxicible. Try specifying width or height, but not both.

Posted in Bolehtics, FOSS | No Comments »

Why use Free Open Source Software in Politics?

It’s a good question. Ask just about anybody, and they’ll tell you that what they know about computers is all based on the world’s favourite typewriter-emulator software. Why should they change to something else? Software isn’t cheap. Its price is often hidden in the price of a new PC that comes bundled with the software. Check the price of the best-known desktop operating system and typewriter emulation software. See? Hundreds, if not over a thousand Ringgit Malaysia.

“No need to buy!” I often hear in Malaysia. And it’s kind of true, like not needing to wear a seatbelt while driving, or not paying tax, or taking the office stationery home with you. There’s no need, until you get caught. If budget is no issue to your political party, then neither is the “Free” part of FOSS. For political parties running on a minimal budget, the price of several hundred licences for operating systems, office software and assorted proprietary packages can add up to a tidy sum. Worse than that, if your opponents were to call an anti software piracy visit on you, the penalty could make it difficult for you to continue operating.

‘Equality before the Law’ is not about forcing everyone to be the same. For new / minimally-funded political groups, the costs of efficiently organising the group can be a barrier to entry into political life. These days, organising is almost always done online, through websites and email, with campaign material designed on and printed from personal computers. The cost of buying proprietary software and risks inherent in using it unlicensed shouldn’t be a barrier – and they’re not, thanks to FOSS.

In the office I work in, all the PCs have Xubuntu installed, an Ubuntu variant. Xubuntu is not just an operating system, but also a collection of all the best FOSS available. If you use a PC equipped with Ubuntu, there’s no need to drive into town to buy a word-processing, spreadsheet, accountancy or image editing package, you can just click on what you want on your desktop, and it will automatically install from the Internet and be ready to use. It can be difficult to find branded PCs without proprietary software pre-installed, but most PC brands will ship (on request) price-reduced PCs ‘blank’ for you to install FOSS on yourself. Some brands even supply PCs with FOSS pre-installed, but they do charge for this.

It gets even better if you want to write your own software, or run servers for collaboration, blogging, forums, mail, chatting or games. To buy proprietary software for these tasks can cost enormous amounts of money. With systems like Ubuntu, it’s all available at the click of a mouse button, and all absolutely free, both in up-front costs and from risk of licence infringment. Old PCs can often be revitalised with FOSS, as many projects are aimed directly at older equipment – we typically use Slackware for this purpose – as well as for our production servers. A PC that might be too old to run recent proprietary hardware can often work perfectly well with a FOSS alternative.

Once your political organisation gets into power, FOSS can really pay dividends. The ‘Open Source’ feature is a guarantee that diverse systems can be easily integrated – there’s no ‘vendor lock-in’ to proprietary data formats. If you wish to bring the systems that served your party well on your route to power into government service, then you have no gigantic licence bill to face: you can continue investing in people instead.

If you’re in a political organisation and you’re not using FOSS, I would like to ask you: Why not?

Posted in FOSS | No Comments »

Where is Pakatan Rakyat HQ?

Since the Perak government’s toys were taken away recently, there have been doubts expressed over the internal organisation of Pakatan Rakyat (PR “People’s Alliance”). It’s only natural to wonder what kind of organisation PR is. They have pitted themselves against the Barisan Nasional (National Front) coalition, which is essentially UMNO plus hangers-on. UMNO is the United Malays National Organisation. ‘Malays’ is a racial category, the largest in Malaysia. Some of the hangers-on are also racist organisations, such as the MCA (Malaysian Chinese Association) and the MIC (Malaysian Indian Congress).

UMNO has some very apparent advantages over other political parties in Malaysia. Visit some of the major cities in Malaysia, and you will see the odd prospect of a political tower block. Coming from the UK, I don’t really understand this side of Malaysian politics. A political party HQ in the UK is (in my experience) somebody’s shed. Have a look at these beauties from KL, Ipoh and Penang:

UMNO buildings at KL, Ipoh and Penang

Where are the Pakatan Rakyat buildings? There are none. It is after all, just a ‘loose alliance’. What about the parties making up the alliance? Where is PAS’ HQ building? I don’t know of any PAS buildings. I’d like to know, so please, if you know, let me know? Thanks. PKR – Parti Keadilan Rakyat – the youngest of the three, obviously hasn’t had time to build a monument to itself yet. If anybody has an artist’s impression of what it’s going to look like… thanks in advance. DAP – Democratic Action Party – seems to me to be the best equipped of the three in terms of properties. I can see the DAP logo above one of my local restaurants:

My local DAP Office - nice ah?

Better than any office of a UK political party! Not bad at all DAP. I think it’s important to show there’s substance to an organisation, so now you have the offices, perhaps it’s time to upgrade the operation. After all, you wouldn’t want anybody to think you are ‘wearing a fur coat and no knickers’.

BN Website - wow!

All 3 coalition members have websites. DAP’s website is clear and simple, PAS’ website looks great – it’s based on the open source content-management system (CMS) Joomla! (You see? It’s free and it looks good!), and I haven’t a clue about PKR’s website, it’s currently unavailable. I may update later when I can see it.[Sat Feb 14 17:30:45 MYT 2009 back up – looks like 3 separate Joomla! websites, but kudos for providing 3 languages!]. The thing I can’t find is a Pakatan Rakyat website. Isn’t this a serious omission? Their adversary, the governing Barisan Nasional, has a beautiful website! In fact, it’s so beautiful, I’m wondering why the entire gov.my domain has to be so crap! Even the main Malaysian government website – www.gov.my – doesn’t work properly in my browser, it claims only to work with Internet Explorer. Not so BN’s website, it’s as perfect a website as ever existed.

The BN member party websites are a different matter altogether. UMNO’s website has to be the most bloated website I’ve seen in a long time – it took several minutes to finish loading! Not so the MIC website, a superb example of irony, it is a single page containing the address of a building – is it a ‘hikerlink’? The MCA website is apparently created with Microsoft Office, and bizarrely presents an image of hikers walking up a grassy hill. Presumably the hikers are following the hikerlink to the MIC office.

I think it’ll be a long time before anybody sees a Pakatan Rakyat skyscraper piercing the clouds above KL. I don’t know why a website is taking so long. It might be possible to convince Malaysians to vote PR on the basis that “we’re not them”, but there’ll always be voters who’ll want to vote for something that actually exists. What is the substance of Pakatan Rakyat? Is it registered as a political organisation somewhere? Does it have a HQ? Why doesn’t it have a website? So many questions, as ever. I’m grateful in advance for your assistance.

Posted in Bolehtics | No Comments »