Today is a historic date for Free/Open Source software. It is the day Mozilla Firefox 1.0 was released to the world. Internet Explorer, its “competitor,” is still the most widely used browser on the net but Firefox, which has already conquered the hearts and minds of web developers, is also slowly making its way into the hard drives of regular people. More importantly I believe that it is also acting as an ambassador for F/OS software. It is showing that F/OS software is alive, relevant, and credible. So while I’m glad that today the world was made aware that it has the option not to use a crappy browser, I’m also especially happy to see the idea that software is not just whatever Microsoft made Dell or Gateway ship with their computers strengthened by this particular event.

And now, on to GNOME stuff. These past few days I’ve had no time to work on the GNOME marketing tasks I had set for myself. But I’ve had time to consider some ways to reach a broader audience and one thing became clear to me while reflecting on Firefox and OpenOffice’s recent good fortunes: the best way to market GNOME is to forget about marketing it.

Like GNOME, Firefox and OpenOffice are useful, functional, well designed, usable pieces of software – with varying degrees of success of course but that’s not the point. GNOME is unique though in that it works on operating systems which, though full of qualities, are minority systems. Microsoft Windows has roughly 95% of the desktop market and Mac OS X 3%. Linux, the BSDs and Solaris – all GNOME systems which I’ll just refer to as Unices from now on – have the rest.

The good news is that much of the market, Microsoft’s share specifically, is up for grabs. Linux has shown that it could occupy a significant percentage of the market in the server space. Many believe that it could do it again with the desktop market. I, of course, believe it too. The bad news… well, I suppose it is that there’s a long road ahead. The bad news for GNOME is that it can’t go anywhere on its own and that it’s dependent on the success of its host operating systems. That unfortunate fact is something the GNOME marketing team cannot ignore and which will always limit it. So what can it do?

I believe that it should shift its efforts from marketing GNOME to marketing GTK+. The “GIMP Toolkit” happens to be one of the elements of GNOME’s technical foundation but it’s also more than that. It’s a complete multi-platform toolkit. Clearly only a very specific segment of the population has any use for a GUI toolkit but what matters is that this segment exists within the full desktop operating system market and not only within the 2% or so of the current GNOME host operating system market. By promoting GTK+ the GNOME marketing team would increase its target audience significantly and instantly. That’s already something to consider. But there’s more.

The GNOME marketing team ought to think about how to best use its limited resources: it could try to market GNOME and find itself selling Unices instead or it could market GTK+ and use that initiative to show off GNOME and draw people to it. Scenario #1 involves getting into the complexities of selling a platform radically different from the dominant one. That means addressing issues like hardware support, switching costs, transfer of custom software, and all that icky stuff. I believe that’s a job best left to vendors. Let RedHat, Novell, or Sun do the heavy lifting since they can’t afford not to do it.

Scenario #2 involves promoting something the team is familiar with and which it can manage. For the most part it’s about developers talking to developers whereas in the first scenario you’d have to address a wide audience – managers, admins, end-users, etc. – on a variety of topics. So not only would the former path require greater sophistication and research, it would also require more volunteers and more efforts. With the GTK+ option, the message is simpler and probably truer to GNOME’s core constituency.

Marketing GTK+ is not only important because of the interest it could create in GNOME; it’s also crucial because it will increase the number of people writing for the platform. While GTK+ is not “the GNOME development platform,” it is the closest thing to it and bridging the gap between the two will be easier than having people making the jump all at once. The importance of GNOME and GTK+ bindings in reaching this goal should be obvious to anyone familiar with the platform. That is certainly the case of the Mono guys who have, better than anyone else I believe, understood the necessity to create a GNOME-friendly multi-platform culture. To some they might have made controversial political decisions. To me, they have adopted exactly the right kind of attitude.

This proposal is obviously a bit twisted. I’d be asking people to work on one thing when they’re really interested in working on another. But I’m convinced that it’s the most efficient way to go: GTK+’s target audience is much much much greater than GNOME’s at the moment, it is homogenous, the marketing team is familiar with it, and as for the message to communicate, focusing on GTK+ is probably much more straightforward than dealing with GNOME and the platform issues.

I’ve always been attracted to sports imagery. I find it daring – if sometimes brash and tacky – and expressive especially in its typography. It’s a guilty pleasure: large commercial lettering, loud colors… it’s far from what I’m normally drawn to. But I admire people who can design that way and who are not afraid of overdoing it. Stylistically it looks to me like a direct derivative from old-fashion commercial sign painting for which I have a soft spot.

When I was a kid, right across the street from my elementary school, there was a commercial sign shop. It closed down a long time ago but I still remember exactly what it looked like, its dark green façade and its beautiful hand-painted white letters on the window. I also remember my father explaining to me what that guy’s job was and how great it was that someone could still make a living that way. I think he too has a soft spot for hand lettering which he passed on to me.

I don’t know for sure but I’m guessing that sign painting is now a lost art in France. Living in Brazil though I have the privilege to see it alive everyday. The streets here are full of hand painted signs: store front advertising, commercial banners suspended above and across the streets – it’s illegal to hang banners in the streets in Belo Horizonte but it’s still done – political signs, etc… They’re everywhere. Though most of them are unremarkable some do stand out, often more by their size and color than by the quality of the lettering. Maybe I’m a complete weirdo but I do enjoy walking passed a giant blue “A” or a huge red “S”

But back to my initial point… I’ve been thinking for while now about experimenting with replacing the modern, glossy, and minimalist look of computer graphics with the loud and popular aesthetics of expensive team sports. What would that be like? Something like this perhaps:

The GNOME Marketing list is discussing ways to define and reach its target audience. But what are we going to propose to the public to identify GNOME visually and to connect with it? I know it’s a side issue, mere promotion, but it’s a stimulating one for me. I’ve proposed in the past to create GNOME posters which belong stylistically to the standard sleek computer graphic design genre. I didn’t do it to imitate anything or anyone. It just came out that way because that minimalism is a part of me. But after it I also felt compelled to try something different which challenged not only my designing habits but also my assumption about the way to communicate my enthusiasm and my hopes for GNOME.

Now, if only CafePress offered dark red t-shirts!

I finished the Letter size version of “Why Choose GNOME?.” A4 versions in French and in English are still available; see this post: “Why Choose GNOME?” Out In PDF.

The design of newer PDF versions of “Why Choose GNOME?” and “Pourquoi choisir GNOME ?” is done. I made a few typographical corrections on the first French version and modified the original English text to bring both documents closer to each other visually. Both are formatted for printing on A4 paper; a North-American-friendly Letter size version should be out soon.

The GNOME Marketing list has woken up from its torpor which is excellent news.

Continuing my work with GNOME promotional material, I designed the following three posters. They are large (1189 × 841 mm; 46 ¾ × 33 in), black and white, and somewhat plain. Their size is meant to draw people in when groups of volunteers are presenting the project at trade shows and conferences. They are black and white to keep production costs low. They are plain because I wouldn’t know how to design them otherwise and I like them that way. ;-)

The theme is “values of the GNOME Project” which I chose to define with those three words: freedom, intelligence, respect. Each word actually represents several of the qualities GNOME embodies. I still have to write the short texts detailing what those are. “Freedom” should explain the benefits of GNOME’s GPL and LGPL licenses. “Intelligence” should illustrate the ways in which GNOME strives to be a smart, integrated, easy-to-use environment. “Respect” should be about the importance of interoperability, accessibility and internationalization.

To give you an idea of how large these posters are, I marked on a scaled-down image of one of them an area which is shown full-size, on a 300 DPI export, next to it. What you’re seeing is a footer which appears on all posters and reads “The GNOME Desktop and Developer Platform – www.gnome.org.”

I want to review as much GNOME promotional material as I can: slides, posters, banners, handouts, pamphets, etc…. I’d like to inventory all of it and put it somewhere it can be reused by all of those involved in GNOME promotional efforts.

Part of this work, the part I enjoy the most, is modernizing some of this material, redesigning it so that it’s more appealing, more consistent and visually stronger than it is now. This afternoon, I reworked the French version of “Why GNOME?” (« Pourquoi choisir GNOME ? » existing PDF | redesigned PDF)

I used Scribus to produce this new version. It’s pretty nice overall though slow and awkward at times and, unfortunately, not GTK+ software. Regardless, it gets the job done.