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Dave finally gets it on the OpenSolaris logo

By David Stewart (Intel) (138 posts) on May 10, 2008 at 9:00 pm

The infamous new bubbles logo, AKA the .com logo
The original classic .org logo

OK, I am a little slow in the uptake here. And I am not in any way shape or form an expert on trademarks and brand management.

That said, I thought the orange and blue opensolaris.org logo would go away completely when the new bubble logo appeared. I was mourning the loss of the distinctive and eye-catching orange (something Tamarah Rockwood mentioned to me as well), and was grumpy about the bubbles in general. I thought the bubbles looked a little like what they show in comic strips when someone is drunk or hung over.

Now I see that opensolaris.org is keeping the old logo for the .org project site, and the new logo/colors are for the binary distro.

Hey, that’s pretty smart …

• It makes a distinction between the community using the distro vs the community contributing to the development.

• When the bubbles are animated (like they were in the CommunityOne keynote) they look really cool

• Of course, the bubble device itself is easier to fit on a button.

• My old orangey swag doesn’t look all old and out-of-date any more.

So now we have distinct appearances for the core development, for Solaris and for OpenSolaris. Add the appearances of the other distros, and life makes sense.

OK, so I told you I’m slow on the uptake, but this represents a turnaround in my thinking. Kudos to whomever had the gumption to punch this one through a certain amount of community grumpiness – it’s a win, 

Now the community needs to get its act together and agree on a mascot, ala tux.

Categories: Open Source

Comments (3)

May 10, 2008 11:19 PM PDT Johnny

Hey, I hadn't thought of that possibility. If you're right and it's designed rather than an omission, then I think that's a brilliant strategy. I do very much like the "old" orange and blue logo, I think it's quite stunning & a unique colour choice amongst all the other "blue and/or green" logos for things out there

May 11, 2008 12:51 PM PDT SW

More like "so close as to be even more confusing than having a .com and a .org website in the first place", from where I'm sitting... it's a pretty basic rule of design, if two things look similar, make them exactly the same or completely different, otherwise one of them just looks like a mistake. (And what about the places where they have to be reproduced in monochrome?)

May 11, 2008 2:04 PM PDT Dave Stewart

SW - You may not be right here, as I said I'm not an expert in these matters. But the bubbles should make things relatively unique for the .com entity. And even though the two logos use the same san serif font, they would even look different in monochrome. The opensolaris coffee mug I got is in monochrome and it's very easy to tell that it refers to the .com entity - because it employs the bubbles! I suspect the orange logo will probably not appear on merchandise any more anyway.

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