What is the Open Source Branding Project?

A dev friendly starter kit, containing a template library with documentation to educate on and structure the process of branding design work for open source projects.

The Goals

The goals if this project is to provide a place for open source projects to seek help from designers, and to model a solution towards design work which is native to the open source methodology. This means:

1. Provide a comphrensive library of design template files which scales intelligently using Smart Objects, similar to the modern UI design practice of building component libraries.
2. Provide structure and documentation to the design process through markdown files which both walk through the design process for those who are inexperienced, while also helping define a clean structure for building a branding design system.
3. Utilize open source and transparent project management solutions like git source control, wiki documentation, and github issue tracking.
4. Providing resources for open source collaborators to bootstrap their own design process. This means listing resource troves for design tools, providing free templates for design work, and guides on improving open source projects branding and visual design in low investment high reward ways.

FAQs

Q: Why should I care about branding design in an open source project?

Open source software is powerful stuff. It runs the world, and underlies most of the technology we use today. Gone are the days of Open Source being looked at with suspicion by [governments], or [large corporations].

This is good, but one thing which hasn't changed so much is the approach which open source projects take towards design, in particular the fluffier kinds like branding and visual design. 16 color terminals, and tight compact IRC channels are still seen as the lifeblood of open source development and a focus on pretty logos or snazzy buttons can often be met with sneers of derision ([This argument has been] [bouncing around the design community] [since time immemorial]).

Visual design is seen as useless, perhaps even a little childish. Open source doesn't need good visual design. Afterall, it's not a product being sold or advertised.

This idea is false. In fact, open source projects need good branding more than close sourced projects.

1. Closed Source projects have their own ad and marketing departments which can easily drown out good open source products. Good code does nothing if no one ever can hear about the project.
2. Close sourced software used for development purposes doesn't need anyone to know about it, except the few developers who use the product, while open source projects need as many people to know about it in order to gain users and contributors.

Q: How is branding different than just making a logo?

A: Branding is bigger than just a logo. It encompasses the entire thought process and implementation of a [brand identity]. [Brand] identity includes things like logos, but it also includes the brand name itself, variations of the logo, the brandmark, brand colors, the typography used, the kinds of illustration or photostyles used, the style of prose writing, styles guides, etc.

A logo is a specific instantiation of a part of the brand identity. A brand identity is the system of collected artifacts and guidelines that make up a brand, and The Brand as a whole is the conceptual underpinning, the narrative and story meant to be communicated about the project.

Here's a great article on the subject. How a Brand is more than a Logo

Project Inspirations:

• [Mozilla Rebrand]
• [Simple] [their github repo]
• [ The Open Source Design community]

If you want help with your open source project:

[please log an issue here]

If you want to help with this open source project:

Project TODO:

• unbrand logos from templates
• outline more templates and functionality
• expand resource list
• figure out solution to binary file limitations