…dead!

A few days ago I suddenly realized Microsoft was dead. I was talking to a young startup founder about how Google was different from Yahoo. I said that Yahoo had been warped from the start by their fear of Microsoft. That was why they’d positioned themselves as a “media company” instead of a technology company. Then I looked at his face and realized he didn’t understand. It was as if I’d told him how much girls liked Barry Manilow in the mid 80s. Barry who?

[…]

Gmail also showed how much you could do with web-based software, if you took advantage of what later came to be called “Ajax.” And that was the second cause of Microsoft’s death: everyone can see the desktop is over. It now seems inevitable that applications will live on the web—not just email, but everything, right up to Photoshop. Even Microsoft sees that now.

“[E]veryone can see the desktop is over.” What does this mean for the “GNOME … and Development Platform”?

The last nail in the coffin came, of all places, from Apple. Thanks to OS X, Apple has come back from the dead in a way that is extremely rare in technology. Their victory is so complete that I’m now surprised when I come across a computer running Windows.

Living in a college town, I can certainly relate to this. The number of students toting Apple hardware—iBooks, MacBooks, and iPods—seems significantly greater than that of students carrying Dell or HP laptops around. Whether at the library or in any of Athens’ coffee houses, all tables belong to Apple’s shiny white plastic machines.

Quim Gil announced about a month ago that, instead of having a different logo every year for GUADEC, the GUADEC organizing committee wanted to create a single logo for all future editions of the event and that it was organizing a design competition to find that new logo. That competition, which stipulates that the new logo should contain the word GUADEC and the GNOME foot, is coming to an end on January 31st 02006.

Generally speaking, I do like the GNOME logo. But I also find it extraordinarily hard to combine with anything, except perhaps for bold letters. I’m not sure why this is but I believe that it might be 1) because it is non-geometric and hence hard to anchor to external elements and 2) because it lacks a strong center or balancing point and hence is hard to align to external elements. Additionally, it is a fairly large mass of a single color or tone and therefore requires complementary elements to be at least as strong and pregnant as it is. Individually these characteristics are OK but the GNOME logo combines them all which throws me off every time I try to do something with it.

To be fair to Jimmac — he created the current version of the GNOME foot from tigert’s original design — I want to make it clear that those reasons why I find it difficult to work with his logo are obviously subjective and only reflect the fact that my designer skills are limited. Many seem to have no problems (re)using that logo in their own projects.

Anyway, after a couple of weeks of trying to design a logo according to the rules I finally decided that I would leave out the GNOME foot and that I would instead create something that I liked, even if it meant that it couldn’t be entered in the competition. At this point it wasn’t about the contest anymore but about my completing this project for myself. One of my earliest ideas included a word balloon to represent the exchange of words and ideas taking place at a conference — someone else actually had the same idea. I reworked it to come up with this:

I believe the logo would work well in colors too and could easily be used to create t-shirts, bags and other conference trinkets. It could also be adapted to include, where appropriate, the name of the hosting city. The typeface used for the word GUADEC is FreeSans.

4th GNOME t-shirt; more coming soon. When is the GNOME Store opening again?

Finished another GNOME t-shirt which should in fact more accurately be described as a Gtk+ t-shirt.

Designing it made me wish Inkscape had diagonal guides. They could be set like orthogonal guides, with a click in and drag from the rulers. To differentiate setting one kind of guide vs. the other, diagonal guide creation could be started with a [Shift] + click or a [Ctrl] + click instead of the regular click alone.

Forget “Seinfeld”, you want to be a pirate!

Scribus source files for GNOME posters and handouts are available at /gnome/promotion/source/. All of it is hereby released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License.

Those documents use the following set of typefaces. While some are free, others aren’t unfortunately. ITC Mendoza, chosen to be the roman counterpart to Trebuchet—the typeface of GNOME’s logo—might be the toughest one to substitute.

• Bitstream Charter Bold Italic
• Bitstream Vera Sans Bold
• Bitstream Vera Sans Roman
• Bitstream Vera Serif Roman
• ITC Mendoza Roman Book
• Trebuchet MS Bold
• Univers 47 Condensed Light
• Univers 65 Bold

Yesterday the marketing team had its first official IRC meeting on #marketing. The goal was to discuss how to pursue our nascent promotional efforts and I think we successfully did so. The plan for the next few months is to grow the amount of promotional material around one theme: GNOME, software for everyone. The consensus was that we should start relatively small by moving towards a better representation of the project in traditional FOSS circles – LUG members, students. Look for a Super Bowl ad in 2006 but not earlier.

For the time being, “software for everyone” is a theme more than a slogan. But it might stick. Its polysemy – “software designed so that anyone can use it” and “free software available to anyone” – is actually growing on me. That theme is to be developed around three points: freedom, ease of use, and accessibility. Stylistically there is no formal definition of what we’re trying to achieve. Successful designs will survive.

The marketing list has been discussing the creation of posters for volunteers to print and take with them wherever they present the GNOME project, typically at conferences and other public events of the same kind. I’ve created a few which I’ll review in more details. What they all have in common is:

1. They were all designed for A0-size paper. That’s 1189 × 841 mm (46 ¾ × 33 in) which is pretty big. However, since the width to height ratio of ISO paper sizes remains the same within a given series – A0, A1, A2, A3, … – the posters should be usable at smaller sizes too.
2. All are black and white and therefore cheap to print.
3. I used the GNOME logo on all of them. This may mean that officially releasing those posters would have to be cleared through the GNOME Foundation. Or it may not; I don’t know. I went for “shoot first; ask questions later” on that one.
4. All of them would need additional “fine print” information like the URL to GNOME’s site and perhaps the Foundation’s address.

Identity posters: these have no other purpose than to communicate GNOME’s presence somewhere. There’s barely any designing here… shame on me.

Augmented identity posters: same as above but with a little bit of text giving the briefest of introductions to the GNOME project. The text is loosely based on wgo’s “What is GNOME?” It could easily be replaced with something better.

“The GNOME project provides two things: the GNOME desktop, an intuitive and attractive desktop environment for corporate and home users, and the GNOME development platform, an extensive framework for building applications. Volunteers, software developers, documentation writers, artists, translators, all work together to make GNOME easy to use, accessible, powerful, innovative and just plain great. Corporations have also joined in the effort and now provide additional resources for the project as well as professional support for GNOME users and developers. Thanks to the GNOME project hundreds of thousands of people worldwide have successfully begun using free software.”

Bonus gizmo poster: Say you’re selling GNOME t-shirts or you have a list of presentations to announce… use a marker and the bonus gizmo poster™ and make your own poster. ;-)

Whimsical posters: These last two I designed for myself more than for public use. It was suggested on the marketing list that posters could have some kind of slogan on them which is not a bad idea except that, as far as I know, there isn’t an official “slogan” for the GNOME project. This didn’t prevent me however from thinking about what more elaborate posters could look like.

The “gentleman’s desktop” idea is something I’ve read somewhere though I cannot remember if it was on a mailing list, in somebody’s blog or in an interview. I really like the idea though I realize of course that it is sexist and unpleasantly plutocratic. Bear in mind then that it is not part of the “official” proposal but merely the result of my indulging my elitist European male fiber. ;-)

The “official desktop of happy people” idea I’m very fond of and I believe it’s a communication avenue worth exploring. It takes the focus away from the technical and political issues to present instead the human and affective aspects of the project. Usability, accessibility, i18n have all been successfully integrated into the development of GNOME at a technical level. That’s an important factor of GNOME’s success and something which should be emphasized because users can relate to it as individuals and as members of a group. Rationally convincing people that using GNOME is a good decision is great. Not having to convince them of the same because they are emotionally drawn to it wouldn’t be bad either.

The text at the bottom of both posters is dummy text by the way. If you’re interested in downloading the PDF versions of all 7 posters, they’re available at www.viralata.net/gnome/promotion/.