Rebranding the release service

[Philippe Cloutier]

Hi Paul,

Le 2021-02-20 à 14:24, Paul Brown a écrit :
> On sábado, 20 de febrero de 2021 18:39:45 (CET) Nate Graham wrote:
>> On 2/20/21 9:35 AM, Philippe Cloutier wrote:
>>> Le 2021-02-20 à 10:38, Luigi Toscano a écrit :
>>>>> In any case, "KDE Gear" sure is short and makes some sense if we
>>>>> consider it
>>>>> related to Extragear, but for those who don't know KDE's history, I am
>>>>> skeptical that gears are a good way to evoke applications.
>>>> It doesn't need to evoke applications, the idea is to have a brand.
>>> Right; if it's not just applications, evoking applications is not as
>>> important. However, if it largely consists of applications, I suppose it
>>> remains non-ideal for the branding to primarily evoke internals.
>> FWIW, as a native English speaker, I like the word "gear" because it has
>> multiple meanings, apart from the historical link to the word "Extragear":
>>
>> 1. Metaphorical synonym for "equipment" or "stuff"
>> 2. Visual reference to the KDE logo/brand
>> 3. Association with technical engineering disciplines, and KDE is known
>> for rigorous, high-quality engineering
>>
>> Overall I think it's a great brand name
> It objectively is. As another native speaker, even the superficial meaning (1)
> is already good, but then you get into the layers and it is genius.


I don't disagree it's a great brand name. It's short for sure; no need 
for abbreviations.

What I'm less sure about is it's good branding for the thing it would 
brand. The "G" would make it a great brand for GNOME products. I guess 
it would be great to brand GNOME Frameworks, or perhaps even GNOME 
Office, the latter being a productivity tool. Gears evoke manual 
transmissions - power, configurability and tinkerability. These are 
great attributes for *tools*.

And these were probably great attributes last millennium to attract 
enthusiasts to KDE. At this point though, what KDE probably needs to get 
to the next stage is organizational backing. And while organizations do 
need tools, only a minority of their members are engineers. 
Configurability is a great attribute for a desktop environment, but for 
most users, accessibility/simplicity is just as important, and there is 
a risk that by using gears as only symbol, the impression we give is 
that we prioritize configurability for power users at the expense of 
user experience, when in fact we want to make manual interventions like 
using the command-line a last resort.

So I'm not so sure that gears should remain as prominent in KDE branding 
in the 2020-s, and I'm not sure that closely tying the name to KDE's 
current symbol is such a good idea. But perhaps a question as important 
as the definition is the audience. What's at stake? Who does the 
"release service" target? Is the "release service" something important, 
which would be covered in an encyclopedic entry about KDE? My 
understanding is that the issue has fair importance, given that the name 
would be used in recurrent, important announcements.


By the way, although I'm not recommending to rename KOffice "KGear" or 
anything, I should mention that as Microsoft seems to be renaming its 
Office to "Microsoft 365", "KOffice" should gradually become a less 
interesting brand for KOffice (even without considering the increasing 
prevalence of remote work).


>
> Cheers
>
> Paul

-- 
Philippe Cloutier
http://www.philippecloutier.com