Hi all,
as you know, we both (Florian and Bernhard) have been invited to Hamburg
to talk with several Sun employed project members about consistent
visual design and branding for OOo.
For more than 15 hours (if we include discussions at lunch and dinner
it's about 20 hours) we discussed the possibilities for an improved
branding with Stefan Taxhet, Rosana Ardila, Lutz Hoeger, Stella Schulze,
Harald Behnke and others. At the end of our meeting we had a phone call
with Louis Suarez-Potts, Cor Nouws, Christoph Noack, Ivan Miskovic and
Nikash Singh.
You probably can imagine that the agenda was quite wide, so I just want
to report the highlights:
Definition of marketing, branding and visual design.
These three expressions belong together: While marketing is about
promoting a mark or brand, creation and augmentation of market share,
branding is nearly the same task, but aiming at a different direction.
With branding you want to establish a mark (brand) in public or improve
it's recognition - not only be repeated usage of the name in the context
of a consistent design, but with a positive emotional attitude. Visual
design is just one part of branding - creation and maintenance of the
graphical branding elements, support of the emotional approach by visual
means.
Because of the similarity between marketing and branding it might be not
reasonable to create an independent OOo project for branding and visual
design that could lead to doubled and uncoordinated action. At least for
the beginning a prominent position inside the marketing project seems to
be sufficient - with regards to the amount of work necessary (especially
if we look at the important events to come: 10th anniversary and OOoCon)
a new project would need more maintenance effort than just a new mailing
list, web page and wiki area.
If the branding initiative will be established inside the marketing
project, it needs to be promoted in a way that raises attention inside
and outside the community. Renaissance proved how this is possible
without being a top level OOo project, but with the support of the OOo
marketing project, this will probably have more positive impact.
Action items for the branding project/initiative:
- Determine all branding relevant areas inside the OOo projects, look
how branding is done at the moment and involve the people working on
these areas in the common effort of creating a consistent branding.
- Define the right number of general branding elements (we found two or
three should be enough if they are presented with similar graphical
surrounding wherever applicable). Find out, which one of the present can
be used unchanged, which need an update, which should be dropped.
- Define guidelines for the right usage of the branding elements.
The logo itself is trademarked. Any usage will have to follow the
trademark policy - so the policy describes IF the logo can be used.
The question HOW the logo and the other branding elements should be used
(distance from other elements, relative position to each other, possible
modifications) has to be covered in design guidelines. Such guidelines
are present for the Mozilla Firefox logo [1], containing of a short
descriptive text and visual examples what is allowed and what should be
avoided.
A third class of such guidelines will be called "How-To", because they
aim to a different goal: They should contain recommendations for
use-cases and campaigns that will not only use the general branding
elements, but should be consistent nevertheless. For these areas we need
templates and examples that can be adapted to the specific needs.
We discussed other topics too, but for the moment this should be enough.
There is a lot to do, and we would like to start with the first action
items as soon as possible. Such a change needs a certain amount of time
to lead to a consistent content of website(s), product, documentation
and marketing material.
If there is the slightest possibility to reach this goal to a certain
extent until our anniversary, press coverage might be much better than
now, when a large computer magazine showed images of different official
OOo webpages, product graphics and documentation (?) with no common
branding language at all...
Best regards
Bernhard and Florian
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