Hi Yuval,
Thanks for raising this issue. Now that some projects are gaining
traction, it's the right time to discuss how the Libre Graphics
community presents itself to the public.
I do have some reserves as to the proposed way to tackle this challenge.
If i understand correctly, your idea is to set a fixed 'brand' for the
Libre Graphics community, and a set of design guidelines to apply to
most/all of the materials that are created for and from it.
In art school, i went through 2 years of corporate identity design. Even
though LG is not a corporation but a community, what's being talked here
is the creation (or rather, consolidation) of an identity. Identity
guidelines and style manuals are commonplace in the corporate world,
defining what you can and cannot do in order to style something as
belonging to your 'brand'. This is because corporate image needs very
clear boundaries so that new designers don't end up unwittingly tweaking
the identity and creating confusion in brand recognition.
However, my impression is that this kind of 'top-down' identity
definition might not be appropriate once we get out of a corporate
context. Namely, i find it downplays the role that new designers might
have in creating new directions for an identity by setting in stone some
directives that they can't stray from.
Of course, one consequence of not having fixed and thorough style
guidelines is that identity gets diluted according to the creative
perspectives of different people. This in an issue for a company, but
less so for a free-culture oriented community. I'm reminded of the
discussion around OSP's logo proposal for LGM2010, which strayed from
the de facto LGM identity so far (the ink splatter). That discussion was
tremendously relevant to me, since it showed that the identity of an
event or community is much more defined by what's done there, rather
than its outward presentation. And that having multiple, coexisting
perspectives on the graphic identity of the community might actually be
a Good Thing(tm), even though it challenges principles that we're
accostumed to when dealing with brands and identities.
It's very interesting to confront coding principles and graphic
guidelines like you did (never thought of it that way), but i think
those metaphors can only go so far. For instance, Linus's law -- "given
enough eyes, all bugs are shallow" -- doesn't really apply to graphic
work: not only do many cooks run the risk of spoiling the broth, but the
'success' of a graphic piece is not measurable by efficiency guidelines,
as lines of code can be. The same regarding your comparison to a 'coding
style guide' -- their purpose is efficiency, since mixed writing styles
make reading code harder; however, should we really constrain the
decisions of designers who might join the boat later, and who might have
something new and unexpected to introduce? Given your proposed 5-year
timeframe, i think this is an issue.
You mentioned the danger of 'reinventing the wheel'. Again, i think this
does not apply to creative and aesthetic perspectives, which are closer
to an evolving and ever-changing set of loose (and often unwritten)
guidelines like a cake recipe, than a functional tool such as a wheel or
a hammer. No sense in reinventing the wheel, sure, but it's a good goal
to aim for a tastier cake at each go. And since everyone's taste is
their own, it's safe to say that no one cake will be ideal for each and
every one of us -- which doesn't mean that we shouldn't keep on working
on fancier recipes.
Finally, i think that one of the most rewarding parts in design work is
having the freedom to experiment and express our own aesthetic
perspectives -- which can seldom be described verbally or textually --,
something that's simply not allowed in a context in which all decisions
were made a priori, where the designer is not a decision-maker or
creator but a simple executor.
I think you made very good points, and please don't understand this as a
dismissal of your proposal -- it's very possible to find common ground
between our multiple views. How can we have a good, solid Libre Graphics
presence and still be open to ever-changing internal views, be them
aesthetic or pragmatic? I'd risk an answer now, but i'd love to know
your thoughts before.
Pardon my large essays, but i hate to feel that i missed some points i
wanted to make.
:r
On 08/19/2010 02:09 PM, Yuval Levy wrote:
On August 19, 2010 03:51:18 am Camille Bissuel wrote:
I'll be glad to provide visuals for the Create community, and from a
designer point of view, it's always a good idea to have some charter to
base on.
exactly. It's like a coding style guide for developers. I don't remember any
such charter presented here in the past five years. It would be a major step
forward, like a coding style guide is a major step forward for a software
project: it solves a significant chunk of potential bike-sheds.
But I don't what to bridle anyone creativity (on the magazine for example)
just because I'm the first one to provide something... furthermore LG
Magazine #0 was here first, and I didn't base my designs on it.
Your intentions are noble. Fact is that if we are to evolve to the next
level, we must stop fiddling at this level. There is a trade-off to be played.
Creativity has to be directed to areas that have not been exploited yet.
So, it really have to be a consensus, especially from the concerned
designers.
Actually more a consensus of the "customers", i.e. the projects represented in
LG or the LG Board. Without the weight of some governance, the consensus will
not last beyond a single edition, while ideally it should last for a few.
Without governance every new designer that joins the fray could see this as a
free game and reinvent the wheel from scratch.
The weight of governance makes the difference between a mature project (that
IMHO LG should strive to be) and a greenfield startup (the impression I have
when looking at it from an external perspective).
On August 19, 2010 07:06:28 am ginger coons wrote:
I would suggest that the magazine, being a slightly different beast from
the site, the logo, the conference, might in fact have a different
aesthetic. Because we're not talking here about a mouthpiece for the Libre
Graphics movement, a brochure, we're talking about a magazine with the
space to grow and change and in fact, build up a community that doesn't
really exist yet: a strong Libre Graphics user community. I think that
could be quite a different thing from the official face.
Mostly agree. Growth and change are not necessarily synonymous and you want
to mix them wisely. Sometimes growth is change, but sometimes it is the
maturity of consistency. You print professionals know it better than the rest
of us: make a good template, use it for a few editions (e.g. a cycle of say
four regular editions and one or two special editions) and revisit when the
content starts breaking the barrier of the media, not the other way around.
Yuv
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