Calligra Branding Presentation & Draft of Guidelines

[Jaroslaw Staniek]

On 16 November 2011 13:35, Boudewijn Rempt <boud at valdyas.org> wrote:

>> But they do for Qt which has even more formal rules. Where do you see
>> the enforcement? The guidelines are for exactly opposite reason: to
>> limit risk of (usually unintentional) fork of visual identity.
>>
>> Sometimes rules have to be explicit in this unfriendly world, if not
>> formally then via explicit guidelines.
>> I am OK with you not happy with this document but it's clear that it
>> has one of the simplest form within communities.
>
> Well, both KDE and Debian are much simpler. I would like to be as close as possible to KDE with our "rules", if not exactly the same.
>

In reality KDE rules have no very cental page but is not as simple as
it seems to be:
- http://kde.org/stuff/clipart.php
- http://techbase.kde.org/Development/Guidelines/CIG/KDE_Logo (and
this is an outdated crystal logo, reported weeks ago)

No guidelines means upside down logos for KDE is equally ok as the
default ones. And I wouldn't promote or even use this a sign if we do
not show we care about that. It's better not to define anything.

Google for  'kde logo' images. 99% of that looks like broken identity
to me. Almost as bad as overusing of blue. We also made so much
anti-promotion ourselves by creating the random splash screens. I am
afraid of comparing that to GNOME.
I have no problem with distorted calligra artwork as long as this is
not no longer reference to Calligra project.

Creativeness is of lower priority than visual identity to me. There's
nothing really wrong with more explicit message that that we wish to
maintain our visual identity. In some countries, especially the USA,
public appearance of nonprofits, usually foundations, is much more
like of companies (in good sense), see Linux Foundation, Mozilla,
GNOME (http://foundation.gnome.org/licensing/index.html). In my
opinion we and KDE general are work in progress compared to that. I
have not seen single complaint that authors cannot be creative because
visual guidelines are defined for the above entities. We're not
foundation so we're only talking about guidelines and not complicated
trademark rules.

Obviously we'll need a vote.

>> Compare to
>> - Fedora http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Logo/UsageGuidelines
>> - openSUSE: http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Trademark_guidelines
>
> Distributions have their own set of legal issues they need to take care of.
>
>> - finally, LibreOffice http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Marketing/Branding
>
> That one is nice (even though they are pretty stupid in specifiying cmyk values, on their own those are meaningless).

We have CMYK BLACK/WHITE so we're done, good for someone who printed
in color and failed...

> They don't talk about not allowing people to make merchandise unless they are libreoffice developers, for instance. The whole page has a way more open, community-oriented feel than the proposed guidelines for Calligra, which feel extremely corporate to me.
>

OK but we do not have this (Debian's) restriction already after we
agreed to do so yesterday. The link at
http://community.kde.org/Calligra/Logos#Guidelines points to draft 2,
I blogged about this last night.

-- 
regards / pozdrawiam, Jaroslaw Staniek
 http://www.linkedin.com/in/jstaniek
 Kexi & Calligra (kexi-project.org, identi.ca/kexi, calligra-suite.org)
 KDE Software Development Platform on MS Windows (windows.kde.org)