Many open source projects use animals for their logos. These include the more famous ones, like GNU, Linux, Ant, MySQL, Suse, and Nautilus, but also some less known projects, like Condor and Entagged. Some even use fake animals, like the Mozilla project.
To continue with this fine tradition, we wanted an animal-based logo for the Research Description Language and the Research Editor as well.
Thinking of science and animals led us naturally to every geneticist's favorite study object: Drosophila melanogaster.
We also wanted to use the Research Editor's short name, REd, as a dominant color. This meant creating an abstract as opposed to a realistic logo. The result is shown at the right.