A while back we talked about designing the branding for Fedora in a Fedora.NEXT world. We’ve kind of fallen behind on the design process. So I’ve been spending some time with the questionnaire answers from the Cloud working group and the Server working group, and I put together the following boards as sort of a design research exercise:
- Fedora Cloud Logo Research – items from the survey answers plus some other visualizations of cloudy stuff.
- Fedora Server Logo Research – items from the survey answers plus some other visualizations of servers and whatnot.
- Brand Systems – sample ‘brand systems’ of the sort we’ll need to make the Fedora.NEXT Fedora products hang together and look related.
- Photographic Pixels – just an attempt at putting together some samples of inspirational artwork for this particular concept and maybe some others – I wasn’t sure what else to call it.
Spending so much time putting this together made me really antsy to design something – so I just threw this together this afternoon. It may and probably does suck, and it is something we can totally throw away if we want. But I thought it might be good to mock something up to start the conversation. If you are a designer looking at this seeing all the issues or if it sparks a new better idea, please get in touch on the design-team mailing list and let’s put some stuff together and riff off each other. I think we should probably do a Fedora.next branding hackfest too as mentioned much earlier, but it might be nice to have some material to work with to start. Maybe? What do you think?
Anyway, here’s my strawman! (click to see it at a larger size):
Okay, some rambling to kind of walk you through this:
- Across the different competitive logos and such I saw a lot of rounded iconic designs, usually with thick outlines. I thought keeping the roundedness might be good to keep us on the same field, but I wanted something a little different than the other organizations / products / etc. had done.
- Maybe the layering effect – kind of like pieces of the Fedora bubble (some stretched and squashed) cut out neatly or punched out and layered on top of each other – is a bit more unique than what is already out there.
- There’s single-color versions too without the affect along the bottom.
- There’s an accent color for each product – but I thought keeping the logos in Fedora blue would help them hang together more, and I don’t know that a huge blast of grape / lime / tangerine the way we do on our current website is a good thing.
- The font I chose for the product names in Montserrat in all caps – this is an openly-licensed font, of course.
- I did a half-ass pixelly pattern for each product too but I haven’t thoguht too deeply yet about how usable those might be or how to apply them yet.
- The workstation logo was the hardest as the name ‘Workstation’ is quite long and doesn’t fit into the scheme as neatly. It also kind of fights a little bit with the glow of the laptop lid. And that is one funky laptop. But maybe it works.
Anyway! Just an idea! Thoughts / feedback are welcome in the comments. Snark, especially snark that isn’t creative or funny at all, can go straight to /dev/null. And if it doesn’t, don’t worry, I’ll mod it out.
Enjoy!
an idea for #fedora next branding http://t.co/SuotMVU7H0
RT @mairin: an idea for #fedora next branding http://t.co/0lyrGMfEtb
RT @mairin: an idea for #fedora next branding http://t.co/SuotMVU7H0
RT @mairin: an idea for #fedora next branding http://t.co/SuotMVU7H0
RT @redhatopen: RT @mairin: an idea for #fedora next branding http://t.co/0lyrGMfEtb
Máirín Duffy: Fedora.NEXT Brand Concept #1 http://t.co/kPg2bJUaYJ
Máirín Duffy: Fedora.NEXT Brand Concept #1 http://t.co/UtIphz6JTi
Sorry for the incredibly vague negative feedback, but there’s just something about the overlapping rounded/sharp-edged shapes that doesn’t fly for me, it looks…bad? I don’t know the words! Sorry! The workstation one especially just doesn’t seem to quite come off. Sorry I don’t know how to put it more, well, usefully.
RT @mairin: an idea for #fedora next branding http://t.co/SuotMVU7H0
#Fedora.NEXT – brend koncept #1 http://t.co/wvwr0WxEBR
RT @mairin: an idea for #fedora next branding http://t.co/SuotMVU7H0
RT @mairin: an idea for #fedora next branding http://t.co/SuotMVU7H0
RT @mairin: an idea for #fedora next branding http://t.co/SuotMVU7H0
RT @mairin: an idea for #fedora next branding http://t.co/SuotMVU7H0
I like the Cloud but think than the Work Station looks like a cell phone more than a PC, and the server look like a building and not a Data Center. but is a good begining 🙂
I think Server would look better if you made it more square, maybe to the point of right angles.
Nice concepts. I would like to see the blue versions with a little more definition and contrast. The shapes and design ideas seem fresh and clean. Would they also be used for plymouth instead of the current default charge?
In general, I like the designs. I like how they hearken to the Fedora infinity logo and maintain a uniform design scheme (it’s obvious that these are all related brands).
However, I think the Workstation logo looks a bit more like a Sidekick cellphone than a laptop. Also, the Server logo immediately made me think of the hills from Super Mario Bros. (the ones with the eyes…).
Keep up the great work, though. I think you’re on to something here. Just needs a little tweaking.
Here is an iteration of some of the ideas for the cloud one (i know, i know, its the easiest one 🙂 )
http://www.ryanlerch.org/blog/fedora-next-logo-ideas-iteration/
[…] Last week I shared a concept for the Fedora.next logos with you, and I received quite a lot of feedback. Thank you for that. The feedback I received mostly clustered along these lines in some form or another: […]
[…] Fedora Design Team připravuje plány na prezentaci tří produktů Fedory, které budeme vydávat tento podzim v rámci iniciativy Fedora.next. Každý z nich bude potřebovat své logo, ale také potřebují jednotný vzhled, který z nich udělá součásti projektu Fedora. Máirín Duffy na tom začala pracovat a připravila několik počátečních návrhů, o kterých si můžete přečíst v zápisku Fedora.NEXT Brand Concept #1. […]
[…] Fedora.next Brand Concept #1 […]