[Design-team] RFC: Designs of the fedora product flyers

[Ankur Sinha]

On Tue, 2015-06-02 at 16:55 -0400, Máirín Duffy wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On 06/02/2015 04:36 PM, Ankur Sinha wrote:
> > At the moment, I'm simply trying to provide the community with 
> > flyers
> > that they can use at events. There hasn't been any discussion about 
> > it
> > that I know of. I had made a workstation flyer for F21 and EMEA was
> > happy to use it at their events (FOSDEM was one I think). I was 
> > just
> > updating it to F22 so that people had something to give out at 
> > events
> > that they attend/organise.
> 
> So what is the motivation to give them out at events? What is the 
> goal 
> of making them available? How are ambassadors using them at event 
> tables? 

Well, all I can say is "spread the word on the new products and about
Fedora in general". I can ask Jiri about how they were used at FOSDEM.
As far as I know, they were kept at the booth and people that came by
and were interested took them.

> Do we have any specific feedback from ambassadors about how 
> useful they were, specific feedback about how booth visitors use them 
> / 
> how the ambassadors might use them to direct a conversation / etc? 


Not that I know of. I'm not aware of any metrics that ambassadors 
 collect that could answer these, and neither am I aware of a
structured method that ambassadors follow to "direct a conversation"
and so on..

> Are 
> there specific ambassadors we can talk to in order to get this 
> information? 

I would think FAmSCo would know, and I can file a ticket requesting
them to gather this info.

> Are these only meant to be given out at events or are there 
> other anticipated applications?

Public facing events that a Fedora volunteer is present at. I cannot
think of any other uses at the moment.

> 
> > I know about the generic release independent one that you refer to 
> > - I
> > updated it a while ago[1]. It'll be nice to have that updated to
> > reflect the changes that Fedora.next brought - it's also on my TODO
> > list.
> 
> Are both the release-specific ones and the generic one meant to be 
> handed out at the same event? (I would anticipate some confusion?)

This is up to the event owner. Like I said, FOSDEM only had the
workstation ones, since the others were either outdated or non
-existent. :( 

My plan was to make these so that they have the option to choose what
fits an event that they're going to - different events often have
different focuses, different target audiences.

> 
> > Ideally, the community should have material ready to use at events 
> > and
> > things, and the workstation flyer is just one of these things. (I'm
> > also working on versions for the server and cloud products.) I must
> > admit that I do not know who creates the flyers and marketing
> > collateral - marketing or design or do they do it together - they
> > haven't been done for a while. Ideally, marketing collateral should
> > also be on our task lists, but it isn't on either the marketing 
> > teams'
> > or the design teams' :(
> > 
> > https://fedorapeople.org/groups/schedule/f-22/f-22-marketing
> > -tasks.html
> > https://fedorapeople.org/groups/schedule/f-22/f-22-design
> > -tasks.html
> 
> This is definitely not a recurring item on the design team's task 
> list 
> because the design team does not (well we try very hard not to) come 
> up 
> with content and we honestly don't have the manpower to update 
> something 
> like that every single release - the cost / benefit analysis doesn't 
> really show a good payoff there for the effort expended vs other 
> projects we typically have on our plate. Providing outdated material 
> IMHO is worse than providing no material at all. I also strongly 
> believe 
> any material we do produce needs to have a well-defined goal and 
> purpose 
> so we can assess whether or not it is successful over time and tweak 
> it 
> to keep it useful (or drop it if it no longer is.)

Makes sense. I thought so too.

> 
> > The flyers are in LaTeX because I happen to be the only person 
> > working
> > on them - and I basically chose what fit me. I'm no designer, and 
> > LaTeX
> > at least makes them look clean, and professional :). However,  if
> > others in the community do want to update and modify them (even 
> > though
> > this doesn't seem to happen often), LaTeX is certainly not the best
> > tool to use.
> 
> I think Scribus may be the best tool for the balance of design 
> capability and easy edit-ability (we can even drive it using external 
> 
> text files so someone editing content would just need to edit 
> particular 
> text files and be able to generate an updated version.)

Ah, nice to know. I'll have to look at it though - I haven't used it in
years!

> 
> > What I had in mind was something like this:
> > - generic "timeless" flyer -> produced in large quantities since it 
> > can
> > be used release after release
> > - product and release specific flyers -> produced in smaller 
> > quantities
> > so that they're not left over
> 
> How would these four pieces of material (1 generic + 1 per Fedora 
> edition) interact though? Remember that folks at conferences are 
> picking 
> up an awful lot of stuff, and there needs to be a clear story about 
> the 
> relationship between the materials we offer. (I'm not saying there 
> isn't, just that I don't know what it is.)

Well, I would think that people at conferences belong to one or more of
the target audiences that the different products have - and I'd expect
them to take the flyer which applies to them. Since we had moved to the
products, I only thought of product specific flyers - that a generic
Fedora flyer would no longer fit in to the system. 

I guess "timeless" product specific flyers could be done instead of
release specific ones, with a single release "what's new in this
release" flyer to show off the new stuff (if needed at all).

> 
> > The ambassadors do have an idea of how many they'd need - they have
> > <snip>
> 
> I think probably a lot of this should be driven via the marketing 
> team - 
> are you in contact with them so this is on the team-wide radar?

Yes. There are trac tickets on the marketing trac for each flyer, and I
regularly send updates to the ML about them. Anyone that keeps up with
the ML and trac should be aware of what's happening. 

The points that have come up here make me think that the marketing
group needs to first speak to someone - either the WGs or the
Ambassadors or the Ambassadors that are also part of the WGs - to
figure out exactly what marketing collateral is needed in the first
place. The flyers and everything is all "pre fedora.next". (I can't recall if fedora.next discussing marketing of the products - I don't 
think so.) Once this is known, the implementation is where the design
team will come in. What do you think?
-- 
Thanks,
Regards,
Ankur Sinha "FranciscoD"

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Ankursinha

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