I thought we did that. We had puppies and goats and periodic tables and all sorts of stuff flying around. The bounds were things like "we're sticking to blue" and "no hats".

We did that too, before and after Matt's design. After his design there were some suggestions made  (make the f look more like an f, pronounce the infinity symbol more). Of the community submitted variations on Matt's design, the only ones near professional enough to even consider were the ones from earlier this week that looks like rain dropping into a pond. If you mean that Matt or Red Hat should have produced more than one version, I think that would have only encouraged apples to oranges discussions. You simply can't look at a nike style swoop v. Adidas three stripes, and start a discussion about which is "better" and make any sense of it. RH took the requirements, distilled the high points of teh discussion and likely went over tons of iterations internally. Someone had to make final cut or or we'd all still be explaining to new list members that a blue hat with a puppy in it wasn't gonna fly.

I don't know that this was run any differently than say deciding which packages to include in Core. The people who cared were consulted. Those who cared the most, gave the most feedback. But at the end of the day, this is a legal issue as well as a branding issue, and RH is the sugar daddy, so it's their call. They have to hire the lawyers to protect it, they have to live with it as an extension of their brand. When you compare RH sales to their market cap, you realize their brand is worth a couple of billion dollars. So I think they could have handled the task very well with out without the immense and multi-month consultation they facilitated about it. And if this was about the software, and not about tradmarks and legal issues and marketing and branding I would have welcomed a massive referendum. But it is about all those things as well as making everyone feel as included as we can.

> If we fell down in this discussion, its in the fact that we only had
> one draft for consideration which met the constraints at step 2.

I dunno, I saw 5-6 designs come out after Matt's. He doesn't have to produce multiple logos for us to have seen multiple logos. Now, we stopped posting all of them at some point I noticed, but we had an awful lot of input and opportunity in the last several months to register our feelings.

--jeremy