Hi, So for a while now I've been working at establishing a set of guidelines for the GNOME brand, including the GNOME logo. An issue has come up and I wanted to ask you all for your thoughts on it: The GNOME 'sublogo' guidelines [1] may be of concern with respect to the defensibility of the GNOME foot's trademark. (See discussion at [2]).
One thing that's been done with Fedora's logo is establish at set of lean & strict guidelines [3], and request that all folks wanting to use the logo email [EMAIL PROTECTED], a ticket system by which people tell us how they plan to use the logo and send mockups/sketches if required (this has happened in the past for magazine cover designs for example.) If approved, we send them the SVG files and a license agreement for usage of the logo. If not approved, we work with them to help them meet the license agreement & usage guidelines. I think that a model like Fedora's might be a bit overkill for GNOME's full brand - but it may be useful for the sublogos specifically. I do think that having guidelines for creative sublogos that relate to the project's mission/goals is a real benefit. My rationale is: (1) Folks are probably going to create them anyway, so we may as well provide guidelines for them to do so in a consistent manner that extends rather than clashes with the brand. (2) The alternatives are not as nice: (a) having rather bland logos that all look the same besides the small sublogo text, or (b) having logos for subprojects that have nothing to do with GNOME's brand and thus we lose an opportunity to make our brand more visible and we lose an association with a project. We could set up a sublogo approval email address, and we could state in the guidelines that folks must submit their sublogo designs to that address for final approval before they may use them. I would be willing to handle these approvals - I do so for Fedora's logo now, so I have some experience with this sort of thing. The reason I bring this up now is just because the guidelines are out there on the wiki now. I marked the sublogo guidelines in particular with the caveat that they have not been officially approved by the board and any designs should be run by the board. So my questions for you folks are: (1) Are there any objections to the proposed sublogo guidelines? Do you think they are too restrictive or too permissive? (2) Do you think the 'creative' sublogos approach is entirely more risk than it is worth? Should we just not allow for sublogos, or only allow for sublogos that use the 'stock' GNOME foot logomark? (3) Do you think having an approval system for sublogos would be an acceptable requirement? Should we contact a lawyer to get some advice? Discuss! :) Thanks, ~m [1] http://live.gnome.org/BrandGuidelines?action=show#head-fd7481407393ff9e54fae8ed1d9f8323547ea88b [2] http://mihmo.livejournal.com/31832.html [3] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Logo/UsageGuidelines -- marketing-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
