A couple of general comments from the sidelines and trademarks@ point of
view:
On 2/8/2013 2:32 AM, Samer Mansour wrote:
Ok I just cranked away at it for a couple hours collecting where AOO
branding is applied.
https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/OOOUSERS/Branding+Planning
https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/OOOUSERS/Apache+OpenOffice+4.0+Brand+Refresh+Project
Great to see the organization and energy happening here!
To clarify, trademarks@ suggests a couple of updates to the Criteria For
Logo & Branding section of the Brand Refresh Project.
1. The primary criteria is that whatever logos, designs, etc. selected
as a final brand must be suitable for use as trademarks. I.e. the ASF
must have sufficient rights to use this brand on behalf of the AOO
project, and be able to defend the use of this brand in the future if
needed. Depending on what the final brand look is created from, we may
want to ask the creator for an explicit legal grant of trademark rights,
just to ensure there are no future questions about it.
2. Separately, (reading through the Restrictions on that page) if the
PMC specifically wanted to, other Apache branding elements could be
included in the AOO branding. While it's certainly never required, it is
permissible for Apache projects to use the Apache feather as part of
their brand as long as it's done in an appropriate fashion.
While personally I love the Apache feather, I'm torn to say if I think
it'd would be a good idea in a future AOO logo. It would certainly
introduce the ASF heritage to the broad OOo/AOO end community, but I
don't actually know if is necessarily the best element to add, given the
existing recognition of the gulls and the blue orb. Also, the Apache
feather is rather complex and is not always easy to scale.
In any case, deciding if you want to include the Apache feather is
completely up to the PMC - I just wanted to let people know it is an option.
...
I need to take a separate sit down to collect the websites we have to
document branding there. I imagine some are not customizable, like
bugzilla, but we are interested in updating logos in places.
Hyperlinks and verbiage should say "Apache OpenOffice Bug Tracker". This
is also an easy fix, not documenting that, just CMS changes.
It's great to include all the developer-facing sites - like the bug
tracker, etc.) in the planning. My only comment is that if we need to
prioritize, I'd think that the end-user facing sites are most important
to get the details consistent on. The more developer-centric parts of
the website are relatively less important, if it comes down to a
question of available volunteer energy to actually complete changes.
Separately, (in the future), might there be any thought of a partial
sub-brand for the developer side of the house? I.e. some additional
logos or styling for people who are interested in building extensions,
or submitting real code patches or joining the committers or the like.
(Note: I can't volunteer here, just throwing out an idea now that people
are getting organized about branding!)
- Shane
