Last week Mark Keating from the Enlightened Perl Organization asked for help creating marketing material for Perl. So in response to that i've decided to spend the weekend doing something i wanted to do for quite some time now, design a logo for Perl 5.

You might remember this post from last year when i tried the same for Perl 6, it sadly did not turn out so well due to lack of interest from the decision makers and ultimately ended up driving me away from that community. This time however the overall experience was much better and i was positively surprised by how pleasant working together with the EPO folks has been. I'm sure there will be more cooperation in the future.

With its 23 years Perl is already one of the older programming languages, some have even called it a dinosaur and dead. But there has been no great dying in the world of programming languages and the Perl community is actually healthier than ever.

So lets assume Perl was a dinosaur that survived to dominate the food chain. It surely has to be a carnivore judging by its razor-sharp regular expressions, and the 20.000 distributions on CPAN show us that it hunts in packs. After a careful review of Jurassic Park i've come to the conclusion that Perl has to be a Velociraptor, and that's what i'm basing the logo on!

Raptors are not just dinosaurs, they are pretty damn badass dinosaurs and have already been used on marketing material for the London Perl Workshop in the past. Here's also a little Mojolicious poster demonstrating its proper use in marketing material.

The logo has already been released to GitHub under the CC-SA license, that means it is open and as long as you attribute it properly you are free to do pretty much whatever you want with it. More formats and sizes will be added over time.

I've also prepared a few t-shirts, you should take a look (americans go here). :)

Disclaimer: Some parts of this story might be fiction.