Considering a logo refresh

[Matthew Miller]

Our "freedom + infinity + voice" logo is awesome -- but it also has some
problems:

* It doesn't work well at small sizes
* It doesn't work at all in a single color
* The "voice" bubble means it's hard to center visually in designs
* The Fedora wordmark is based on a non-open-source font
* I'm tired of explaining that it's not Facebook

As much as I love our "classic" logo, I think it may be time for a refresh.

It's not just about problems -- as we're getting into Year 15, and five
years (!) of Fedora.next, our editions strategy is drifting away from
"Fedora + logical thing" (like "Fedora Server" or "Fedora
Cloud") into more
unique brands like "Fedora CoreOS" or "Fedora Silverblue". As I said
at
Flock, the important thing about Fedora to me is the _people_ — I'd like
"Fedora" to be more assocated with the project and the community rather than
our software artifacts. I'd love to have a logo which can work as a
"community umbrella".

What do you think?

-- 
Matthew Miller
<mattdm(a)fedoraproject.org&gt;
Fedora Project Leader

[Sanja Bonic]

I second the logo refresh for all the reasons you mentioned. +1

On Thu, 4 Oct 2018, 22:03 Matthew Miller, <mattdm(a)fedoraproject.org&gt; wrote:

>  Our "freedom + infinity + voice" logo is awesome -- but it
> also has some
>  problems:
>
>  * It doesn't work well at small sizes
>  * It doesn't work at all in a single color
>  * The "voice" bubble means it's hard to center visually in designs
>  * The Fedora wordmark is based on a non-open-source font
>  * I'm tired of explaining that it's not Facebook
>
>  As much as I love our "classic" logo, I think it may be time for a refresh.
>
>  It's not just about problems -- as we're getting into Year 15, and five
>  years (!) of Fedora.next, our editions strategy is drifting away from
>  "Fedora + logical thing" (like "Fedora Server" or "Fedora
> Cloud") into more
>  unique brands like "Fedora CoreOS" or "Fedora Silverblue". As I said
> at
>  Flock, the important thing about Fedora to me is the _people_ — I'd like
>  "Fedora" to be more assocated with the project and the community rather
>  than
>  our software artifacts. I'd love to have a logo which can work as a
>  "community umbrella".
>
>  What do you think?
>
>  --
>  Matthew Miller
>  <mattdm(a)fedoraproject.org&gt;
>  Fedora Project Leader
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[Justin W. Flory]

On 10/4/18 5:02 PM, Matthew Miller wrote:
>  Our "freedom + infinity + voice" logo is awesome -- but it
> also has some
>  problems:
>  
>  * It doesn't work well at small sizes
>  * It doesn't work at all in a single color
>  * The "voice" bubble means it's hard to center visually in designs
>  * The Fedora wordmark is based on a non-open-source font
>  * I'm tired of explaining that it's not Facebook
>  
>  As much as I love our "classic" logo, I think it may be time for a refresh.
>  
>  It's not just about problems -- as we're getting into Year 15, and five
>  years (!) of Fedora.next, our editions strategy is drifting away from
>  "Fedora + logical thing" (like "Fedora Server" or "Fedora
> Cloud") into more
>  unique brands like "Fedora CoreOS" or "Fedora Silverblue". As I said
> at
>  Flock, the important thing about Fedora to me is the _people_ — I'd like
>  "Fedora" to be more assocated with the project and the community rather than
>  our software artifacts. I'd love to have a logo which can work as a
>  "community umbrella".
>  
>  What do you think?
>   
This logic makes sense to me. I'm also open-minded to a 2018 refresh.
There should probably be some level of engagement with the Fedora Design
Team on this too.

It is too bad tattoos aren't as easy to update as Fedora. :)

-- 
Cheers,
Justin W. Flory
jflory7(a)gmail.com

[Peter Robinson]

>  Our "freedom + infinity + voice" logo is awesome -- but it
> also has some
>  problems:
>
>  * It doesn't work well at small sizes
>  * It doesn't work at all in a single color
>  * The "voice" bubble means it's hard to center visually in designs
>  * The Fedora wordmark is based on a non-open-source font
>  * I'm tired of explaining that it's not Facebook
>
>  As much as I love our "classic" logo, I think it may be time for a refresh.
>
>  It's not just about problems -- as we're getting into Year 15, and five
>  years (!) of Fedora.next, our editions strategy is drifting away from
>  "Fedora + logical thing" (like "Fedora Server" or "Fedora
> Cloud") into more
>  unique brands like "Fedora CoreOS" or "Fedora Silverblue". As I said
> at
>  Flock, the important thing about Fedora to me is the _people_ — I'd like
>  "Fedora" to be more assocated with the project and the community rather than
>  our software artifacts. I'd love to have a logo which can work as a
>  "community umbrella".
>
>  What do you think? 
I agree with most of the sentiment above, I think being a community
project we should reach out to the community for their thoughts.

I also have some questions that you seem to have avoided or forgotten:
* who is going to do the work?
* do we have budget to do this? Yes, I think it would be fun to get
the community involved for ideas but I think also budget for a design
agency to take some of those ideas to a logo suitable for the next 15
years would be awesome! See the Red Hat effort about the redesign for
shadow man for an example here (no further comment on that!)
* Without an effective marketing team how do we deal with that?
* Without an effective web team how do we deal with that?

Basically I think it makes a lot of sense to have a new logo but all
the above provides to me with more questions and zero answers.

Also what else do we change in the process? Or do we keep colours and
other such things to provide consistency?

Sorry, I'm not going to be a +1 here or a "get the design team to
argue about this" sort of person.... it's a 15 year old brand, if
we're going to change it we need to do it properly!

[Justin W. Flory]

On 10/4/18 5:52 PM, Peter Robinson wrote:
>  * who is going to do the work?
>  * do we have budget to do this? Yes, I think it would be fun to get
>  the community involved for ideas but I think also budget for a design
>  agency to take some of those ideas to a logo suitable for the next 15
>  years would be awesome! See the Red Hat effort about the redesign for
>  shadow man for an example here (no further comment on that!)
>  * Without an effective marketing team how do we deal with that?
>  * Without an effective web team how do we deal with that?
>   
This could be a good opportunity to reevaluate the relationship of
different mindshare teams we already have in Fedora and how we can
better support them in their work. Because we do have a design team, a
marketing team, and a web team doing great work – so I am curious where
the perception of effectiveness arises. :)

I want to clarify my previous comment. I imagine everyone agrees it
should be open and transparent, but we may define those differently. It
should include engagement and active participation of mindshare teams in
a process to update the logo. If the logo is refreshed without active
involvement of these teams, whatever the final result is won't feel
representative of our community—to me.

If working with mindshare teams in this process feels tedious or that it
would draw this process out over a long stretch of time, it's worth
considering why that is and what we can do to make it not feel this way.

-- 
Cheers,
Justin W. Flory
jflory7(a)gmail.com

[Stephen John Smoogen]

On Thu, 4 Oct 2018 at 17:03, Matthew Miller <mattdm(a)fedoraproject.org&gt; wrote:
>  Our "freedom + infinity + voice" logo is awesome -- but it also has some
>  problems:
>
>  * It doesn't work well at small sizes
>  * It doesn't work at all in a single color
>  * The "voice" bubble means it's hard to center visually in designs
>  * The Fedora wordmark is based on a non-open-source font
>  * I'm tired of explaining that it's not Facebook
>  
If for no other reason that that.. I am for this :).

[Yes that's me ... you might be asking how this old contrarian is for
changing something major... It all started when I got tired of
explaining that I don't work for Facebook because I have an stylized F
on my laptop... ]

The other points I also agree with too. The amount of work design
people have had to do to 'make' the logo work with various things is
usually more work than any coder would be willing to do to make their
code continually work without a rewrite of the code. So I am all for a
rewrite here.


-- 
Stephen J Smoogen.