GNOME Logo Branding Guidelines Concerns

[Máirín Duffy <duffy redhat com>]

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 logo fedoraproject org, 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