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
