On 10/26/2012 4:36 AM, Graham Lauder wrote: ...
The proposal therefore is to initiate a contest to create this new branding, this would have multiple benefits in terms of community outreach, marketing and raising brand awareness.
...
Several Apache projects have run logo contests in the past; some were quite successful both with wide participation and good designs to come out of them. As noted in many of the comments on this thread, there are a lot of details to work out, especially if the PMC is looking for a whole "branding" package of logos, icons, colors, etc.
- Be clear in your request for submissions. Spend the time to go over the whole package you plan to put out, since it will get a lot of interest. Having a good experience for submitters with clear guidelines on what parts of branding are being sought, and if designs are expected to be used as-is, or if designs may be modified once selected is important.
- I'd suggest having a preliminary voting round (primarily community based), and then a separate runoff round from the top X voted designs (primarily committer based, with the PMC making final decision). With a large number of original submissions, it's really hard to get a good sense of support for each one. Runoffs from the top designs are much simpler, plus the PMC can use the runoff selection process to promote or restrict designs the PMC has specific thoughts on.
The various points on this thread about the community here on ooo-dev@ versus the actual end-user community are spot on as well. Re-branding a product with this many millions of end users is important to do carefully and consistently.
- From the legal standpoint, we will likely need the winning designer to donate all trademark rights in the design(s) to the ASF explicitly. Given that we may register new trademarks about AOO, we will need to be clear on this point. But the details can be handled later, and should not be difficult, so don't let that get in the way of running the contest!
- Shane
