The Chapel Parallel Programming Language

The current Chapel logo:

came about as the result of a contest that was announced to the Chapel community and Cray Inc.'s employees in January 2011. We received nearly 100 entries in the contest, which were rated by a panel of judges from Cray corporate leadership and the Chapel team. The winning entry by a large margin was the following design, submitted by Kristina Davis and Timothy Stitt from the Center for Research Computing (CRC) at the University of Notre Dame: Their entry was inspired by the following illustration by Oli Laurelle which appeared in an article in CACM:                

From there, Cray's marketing department (most notably Jim Cissell) worked from Kristina and Tim's design to visually simplify it for the sake of reproduction at small scale, and to improve visual recognition. The choice was made to adopt Cray's corporate typeface to provide a nod to Chapel's origins at Cray. The Cray name was also added, but designed to be separable to support Chapel's transition from a Cray-centric project to a broader community effort. This resulted in Chapel's first official logo:

When Hewlett Packard Enterprise acquired Cray in 2020, the Cray mark was dropped, resulting in the current logo.