Logo
For many years FreeBSD's logo was the generic BSD daemon, also called Beastie, a distorted pronunciation of BSD. First appearing in 1976 on UNIX T-shirts purchased by Bell Labs, the more popular versions of the BSD daemon were drawn by animation director John Lasseter beginning in 1984. Several FreeBSD-specific versions were later drawn by Tatsumi Hosokawa. Through the years Beastie became both beloved and criticized as perhaps inappropriate for corporate and mass market exposure. Moreover it was not unique to FreeBSD. In lithographic terms, the Lasseter graphic is not line art and often requires a screened, four colour photo offset printing process for faithful reproduction on physical surfaces such as paper. Moreover, the BSD daemon was thought to be too graphically detailed for smooth size scaling and aesthetically over dependent upon multiple colour gradations, making it hard to reliably reproduce as a simple, standardized logo in only two or three colours, much less in monochrome. Because of these worries, a competition was held and a new logo designed by Anton K. Gural, still echoing the BSD daemon, was released on 8 October 2005. Meanwhile Lasseter's much known take on the BSD daemon carries forth as the official mascot of the FreeBSD Project.
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