COmanage Developers List

At 1:50 PM -0600 6/19/08, Ken Klingenstein wrote:
>   One option is for us chickens on comanage-dev to come up with 
> something else or bless the gear.  The Shib logo and the Grouper 
> logo were done by chickens.
>   Another option is to use a branding company. Internet2 hired a 
> company to do InCommon (http://www.incommonfederation.org/). I was 
> real pleased with the result (even the unibrow :)), but it wasn't 
> cheap or quick.

For open source projects, I think there's a tradition of choosing 
logo's that are slightly "edgy" (Tomcat is the poster child for this, 
but there are lots of other examples). I happen to like this trend, 
but I'd also note that we can choose to go this way or not.

The alternative (well, the other end of the spectrum) is what I'd 
describe as over-designed, over-sleek, post-Danish modern designs. 
Over the last decade, a lot of companies have renamed, rebranded 
themselves into the international sphere, and chosen designs of this 
ilk. IMHO, these designs may be unique, and might be considered a 
"brand", but, for me, they don't  convey anything about the entity or 
the business its in. Maybe in the age of conglomerates (remember way 
back then...  ;-)  ), that was the point.

The Shib project chose a middle road for this process. We talked 
about "what concept do we want to portray", developed a consensus 
around that, and Scott then suggested a Gryphon as a possible symbol. 
Greg than had a graphic designer develop several possible Gryphons; 
we iterated it thru, and got a specific design that everyone was 
comfortable with.

The key idea here, for me, is that WE have to identify the concept 
that we want the logo to convey. Its then up to the designer to find 
an image to convey that idea. (In the Shib instance, we also 
suggested a possible symbol.) But, we can't really ask the designer 
to identity the concept.

The attached slide (in its entirety) conveys the concept; somehow, 
that has to be shrunk down into a single symbol.