Re: Logo discussion

Guillaume Paumier wrote:
> Hello,
>
> First, sorry for answering this thread only now.
>
> On 5/15/07, Andrew Whitworth <[email protected]> wrote:
>   
>> Who has the final say in the logo? can each wikibooks project select a
>> logo
>> individually, or do all wikibooks projects have to have the same logo?
>> What
>> I mean to ask is, can the en.wikibooks community vote on the issue
>> themselves, or do we have to have a "global" discussion on meta only?
>>     
>
>
> The board has the final say in the logo. It should take a decision about
> logos chosen by members of the community after asking recommendation from
> the Marketing Committee.
>
> About the color issue: logos must be specific from each project. It should
> avoid Wikimedia colors and blue derivative ones, as we already have too many
> blue logos. A logo is the most important vector of visual identity and each
> project must have its own identity, thus its own color in logo.
>
>   
What is this "marketing committee"? I have never heard about this group 
at all.  I know there is a plethora of planning groups that report only 
to the WMF board, but it seems this is getting just a little out of hand 
here.  And I know for a fact that the current Wikibooks logo did not 
have "approval" from the WMF board nor even from Jimbo, even through I 
don't think he openly objected to the idea.  This is precisely what I 
was talking about when I said that the board needs to be very clear what 
the ground rules ought to be well before we try to come up with a logo, 
and this seems to be far too much bureaucracy than is absolutely 
needed.  I mean, how many sister projects are there, and why can't a 
well formed ad hoc committee that was formed independently by users 
themselves be able to present such an idea directly to the WMF board 
itself?  How many times per year is the WMF expecting that logos are 
going to be changing for each project?

This isn't to say that the WMF can't ask a group of independent people 
(say a marketing committee) to review logo proposals after it has been 
formally presented to the board, but this group should not be the 
"gatekeepers" on any logo proposal.

As far as the visual colors of a project are concerned, I don't 
understand this attitude at all.  Particularly with Eric's current rant 
about trying to unify the marketing image of the WMF and the various 
sister projects, it seems like this would be something that could give a 
visual clue that all of these projects are somehow related, if they tend 
to show similar color schemes.  By encouraging completely different 
visual identities, it is in effect suggesting that each sister project 
can go its own way and ignore the wishes of the WMF.  I have seen some 
very well designed corporate logos for subsidiary companies that have a 
common motif and color scheme to suggest corporate unity, even through 
the logos themselves vary quite a bit.

This hard-core attitude that not only are related color schemes supposed 
to be different but simply can't use the main WMF logo colors at all in 
any way, nor even suggest the WMF in any other way seems to fly in a 
diametrically opposite direction from any kind of common marketing or 
unifying philosophy.