Next decade, new logo: Icrontic 2017
Blood and destruction shall be so in use,
And dreadful objects so familiar,
That mothers shall but smile when they behold
Their infants quartered with the hands of war,
All pity choked with custom of fell deeds,
And Ivan’s spirit, ranging for revenge,
With Spudz by his side come hot from hell,
Shall in these confines with a monarch’s voice
Cry “Havoc!” and let slip the dogs of war,
That this foul deed shall smell above the earth
With carrion men, groaning for burial.
Sooo... a logo change, eh? This is fine. 
It seemed appropriate to announce this on May 24, the day Icrontic was wiped from the Internet back in 2003 before starting anew a week later on June 2. In its first few years of existence, old Icrontic had no fewer than 6 logos. Our current logo has had a really remarkable stretch by comparison - a full decade exactly!
The 2007 Icrontic logo debuted as the splintered communities of Short-Media and Icrontic were merged together exactly 4 years later, and it has a lot going for it. As its creator, I've obviously always been very (the most?) partial to it. But it also has several serious issues - some original sins, some accrued baggage:
- Lopsided: It fits into many spaces awkwardly.
- Tricolor: The hat adds two colors (white, orange) making it challenging to use in many contexts.
- The Fedora: Meme-ified in 2012 to be synonymous with neckbeards & mysogyny. Oof.
- Scaling: The hat becomes fuzzy at small size, and gets weird at jumbo size.
- Wordmark: It has no good abbreviation (e.g. for a favicon). "IC" is common shorthand with no logo equivalent. The fedora alone looks all wrong.
- Mascot conflict: By hatting the first 'i', full-illustration Ivan (a more recent innovation) and the logo cannot appear in the same graphic without it being weird.
What it does well is convey a tone and nice throwbacks to earlier eras of the site. The attitude & voice of Icrontic was conveyed in the past in many ways: irreverence, snappy (and nonsensical) catch phrases, Spudz' shades & panama hat, and the color scheme were all contributors. Even that little curve in the bottom of the 'T' has always stayed consistent over the years.
The fedora was trying to convey a bit of film noir; perhaps some comic book hero flavor. Unfortunately, every year since 2012 (the debut of the "m'lady" meme) has put another nail in that coffin. That dog don't hunt no more.
So what next?
If I've learned one thing, it's to never start fresh. You can iterate away the problems, but a clean slate also loses everything you've learned. Like well-seasoned cast iron, the flavor of Icrontic cannot be applied in one layer.
SOUND AUTOPLAYS: Every Icrontic logo & the big 2017 reveal!
You can thank @keto for the audio. 
In this case, I chose to keep the logo font (Myriad Pro), down to the derpy dot over the lowercase 'i' that I artificially elongated just a smidge back in 2007. I went down a bunch of dead ends with the first 'i' until I conceded I was no typographer and it needed to mirror the other one. I pulled the 'c' in close, and knew I was onto something because we had the beginnings of an 'ic' wordmark.
Are the letters hugging? Are they leaning on their neighbors? Have they formed cliques? Why don't 'c' and 'r' like each other, anyway? It's like the letters are some kind of weird community...
That a new wordmark is mirrored on both ends of the logo was the cherry that made it too good to ignore: Icrontic had a new logo.
Throwbacks? Check. Tone? Check. Known problems solved? Check x6! While the 2007 logo will forever be remembered as the progenitor of Ivan (who is most assuredly sticking around), it's time to set it out to pasture.
Here's to another decade with the new logo. It's gonna look fresh as hell on new swag. 
Comments
I really like that it's kinda quirky, like us as a community! I never knew I wanted that in a logo until now.
ic what you did there.
I hate change, change is bad, this suk!!!!1!1!11!
It also look pretty cool upside down. Just saying.
Was hoping for a throwback to the April 1, 2009 logo. That one is my favorite.
With the reduction in prominence of the first "i" in the logo, do we need to revise the Icrontic Salute?
I love it. Great representation of what Icrontic means in 2017.
Side note: I will never forgive the internet for ruining hats and fedoras. I'm still mad, and I'll always be mad.
This makes perfect sense; I had a lot of trouble placing the logo when I made @Kwitko's bat all those years ago and again this month when putting it on a KSP flag. I'm not sure the new one will work as well sprayed on the side of spaceship though; do you have another accompanied by Ivan or Spudz in the works?
By removing the fedora you are not respecting our great heritage!
I was rather fond of this experiment I did:
The Salute™ will stay that way forever. It's as classic as a handshake.
scumbag site owner changes the logo, leaves the old one on the site header
Never leave reveal beats to the engineers!
Spoilers, man! I may wait til the traditional June 2 anyway. It's like the Icrontic Passover.
Pft. I've been burned enough times that I leave a beat between announcements and actual changes. This is pro-level beats.
Logo files:
http://icrontic.com/images/icrontic-logo-2017.png
http://icrontic.com/images/icrontic-logo-2017.svg
A few obligatory notes:
The clipped letters and squeezed glyphs have shades of the Austin Powers logo. I'm not sure how to feel about that in 2017, but I appreciate the thirst for evolving our tired logo.
I like the clipped letters on the IC, but I feel like "RONT" could have a less thick outline. Otherwise I can't say much else but bravo; it's really well-thought out and executed.
For the record, I did not alter the dimensions of the typography (sans the dots). If you restore the kerning & cutouts it is still exactly Myriad Pro.
It's a scaling consideration, in part. You lose considerable character separation at small sizes. It's exactly thick enough to still register at favicon / tiny badge size without becoming a black blob. I started with a more slender outline and worked upward until it achieved this, then adjusted alignment and kerning to work best with that thickness.
//edit: To demo this, open the SVG linked above in a tab and zoom all the way out.
It's fantastic!
Beats by Linc?
Ahahahahaha that's the worst thing I ever recorded, at least that got released anwhere public, and I had totally mind wiped it from my consciousness. You should see the smile on my face right now. Thanks for remembering, I didn't think any of my old stuff I did for (all SM I think) was out there any more.
And I dig the new logo, I'm a big fan of simple straightforward.
Let me be the first to say, it looks like the i's are hip grabbing or pushing and humping the bent over c's
Now I will never not see that.
It wouldn't be an authentic @Linc logo if there wasn't a visual Freudian slip in there.
Looks good
The new logo is fun... but look at all that wasted space in the header:
@Zanthian As ever, try refreshing your cache. I played with it for like 20 minutes yesterday. It even resizes with the sidebar now when it goes into widescreen mode.
I heard you like resizes