Beautiful logo redesign as part of the rebranding of Crossref

Crossref — the non-profit organization that helps make academic content easier to find, link, cite and assess — has today announced a rebranding. They will be announcing new names and new logos for all of their products, and the Crossref logo itself gains a beautiful looking new design. So we say 'goodbye' to this:

 

And 'hello' to this lovely logo:

 

The explanation for why they wanted to change the logo makes a lot of sense to me:

We needed an icon to give more flexibility across the web that a word mark cannot do alone. The icon is made up of two interlinked angle brackets familiar to those who work with metadata, and can also act as arrows depicting Metadata In and Metadata Out, two themes under which our services can generally be grouped.

As part of this rebranding, they are formalizing a change from CrossRef to Crossref (with lower case 'R'). Someone had a fun job updating their Wikipedia page:

Wikipedia edit history: CrossRef > Crossref. Click to enlarge.

Inconsistent bioinformatics branding: SAMtools vs Samtools vs samtools

The popular Sequence Alignment Map format, SAM, has given rise to an equally popular toolkit for working with SAM files (and BAM, CRAM too). But what is the name of this tool?


SAMtools?

If we read the official publication, then we see this software described as 'SAMtools' (also described by Wikipedia in this manner).

Samtools?

Head to the official website and we see consistent references to 'Samtools'.

samtools?

Head to the official GitHub repository and we see consistent references to 'samtools'.


This is not exactly a problem that is halting the important work of bioinformaticians around the world, but I find it surprising that all of these names are in use by the people that developed the software. Unix-based software is typically — but not always — implemented as a set of lower-case commands and this can add one level of confusion when comparing a tool's name to the actual commands that are run ('samtools' is what you type at the terminal). However, you can still be consistent in your documentation!