History Of The Blender Logo And Suzanne

Published by Eugene (etr9j) on July 20th, 2006 in Miscellaneous

Have you ever wondered where the Blender logo came from? Or even why our beloved program is called Blender? Joeri Kassenaar gives us a history of the Blender logo (along with some interesting history of Blender itself).

As far as Suzanne goes, the almighty Wikipedia answers all! It's an interesting parallel that Blender got its name from a song titled "Blender", and that Suzanne got her name from a monkey in a movie, who's soundtrack (you can hear a clip in this link) had a song titled "Susanne." Okay, so not exactly parallel.

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19 Responses to “History Of The Blender Logo And Suzanne”

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1 Joeri Jul 20th, 2006 at 7:54 pm

I've put the official logo eps here:
http://www.nonakassenaar.nl/blender/Logoblender.eps
But don't tell the owners, they might want me to take it offline again.
2 mattie Jul 20th, 2006 at 8:49 pm

nice :)
3 laughing cheese Jul 20th, 2006 at 8:54 pm

LOL!!! I was just asking about this. Did you read my post? :p
4 bart Jul 20th, 2006 at 9:05 pm

@laughing cheese: yes :) we have eyes everywhere!
5 Alex_G Jul 20th, 2006 at 11:07 pm

the song is actually called "Susanne" without a "Z" and you can get it on the Blue Album deluxe by Weezer

rock on! =w=
6 bestfx Jul 21st, 2006 at 12:39 am

Why is the name "Blender" ?
7 Eugene (etr9j) Jul 21st, 2006 at 1:40 am

@Alex_G
Good catch - corrected! I didn't know it was on the Blue Album deluxe - thanks for the info… I have the Mallrats soundtrack so I never looked for the song anywhere else.
8 jarkkopoika Jul 21st, 2006 at 8:40 am

:D

The greatest feature ever - NO ray tracing!!!

Thats a really genious marketing trick about how to transform a weakness to a feature.

http://www.nonakassenaar.nl/blender/blogo/old.blender.nl/features/features.html
9 Hai Jul 21st, 2006 at 9:28 am

So sweet and nostalgic… :)
10 Toon Scheur Jul 21st, 2006 at 4:23 pm

Suzanne is modeled after Dexter's (from Dexter Laboratory) monkey, am I rght?
If not, the similarities are striking anyway :)
11 Toon Scheur Jul 21st, 2006 at 4:26 pm

I remember Blender used to fit on a floppy. Now it takes a whole 0.2% of my memory stick, sniff :.-(

Luckily the download speeds grows faster than Blender's file size :-D
12 Eugene (etr9j) Jul 21st, 2006 at 6:09 pm

@Toon Scheur
Good call on the similarity with Monkey from Dexter's Lab. For those that didn't watch the show: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dexter's_Laboratory#Dial_.22M.22_for_Monkey
13 Alexandre Rangel Jul 21st, 2006 at 6:28 pm

Great to know this. Thanks for sharing the inside scoop, Joeri!
14 Toon Scheur Jul 21st, 2006 at 6:45 pm

@Eugene
Which brings us to the question: Isn't this a copyright infrigment? I guess that those Hanna Barbera folks never heard of Blender, but that might change in the future.

Anyway, those marketing guys did a magnificent job back in the NaN days. Reading those Blender 1.73 specs got me all fired up (LOL). NO raytracing!!! Of course raytracing back then was as slow as a fluid sim these days.
15 Mantar Jul 21st, 2006 at 8:39 pm

@Toon Scheur: You can't copyright "A cartoon style caricature of a monkey." Now if Suzanne had been named "Monkey, yes, we mean the one from Dexter's Laboratory" then there might be trouble.
16 Toon Scheur Jul 21st, 2006 at 9:22 pm

Are you sure? So Mickey Mouse could be copied as long you don't call him Mickey Mouse?
I still remember that the carnaval parade some 15 years ago in Zeeland (Netherland) was halted by the bulldog lawyers of Disney because they had some Disney themed (i.e. Donald Duck) choaches.

But indeed it makes a lot of sense that you cannot copyright caricatures of existing animals.
17 Calvin Jul 22nd, 2006 at 12:25 am

Mantar: " You can’t copyright “A cartoon style caricature of a monkey.” Now if Suzanne had been named “Monkey.."

Actually it is named "Monkey" in Blender, When you add the mesh. Space-> Add -> Mesh -> Monkey
18 Samo Jul 23rd, 2006 at 2:27 pm

Great work Joeri, a very interesting bunch of information for people interested in Blender.

And funny to see you also put up the Chicken logos up there. :)
19 Quantum Anomaly Dec 21st, 2007 at 3:59 am

Wow, I didn't know there was so much history behind it!
So is there a current branding guide we can use when making/using the blender logo in various places? I see so many different versions of it in people's creations…
I suppose the color theme still holds true:

BLUE
C:100
M:43
Y:0
K:34

ORANGE:
C:0
M:56
Y:87
K:0

May as well release the logo as a font or a .blend or something so everyone can accurately represent it.
Or maybe I'm being too komakai.