Taking this opportunity to personally thank you for making a good logo, I absolutely love the Debian swirl! There are so many boring geometric or single-letter logos out there, the details and texture of the swirl is just so good.
Simple and recognizable. Exactly what a logo is supposed to be. I think it's the best logo in all of OSS. Basically the Nike swoosh of OSS, everyone else has to put the name of the software on the logo so people will know what it is. But you see the swirl, and you instantly know it's Debian without any explanation.
It was tied to magic smoke! But a different of kind. The original requirements called for two logos, one for restricted use, and one for general use. The one that’s being used for general use now was meant to be only for restricted use. The original had a genie bottle from which the swirl came out, the concept was that something very powerful had been unleashed onto the world, free of charge, that stood to change the world. I was inspired by Neil Stephenson’s story The Hole Hawg of Operating Systems - Unix.