Stuart Jarvis

Just a quickie:

If you haven’t yet submitted your design for a KDE software label then you have just over a week (until 31 May) to do so.

There have been some great additions and refinements in the last few weeks and picking the best is going to be a difficult task. But we don’t mind if you make it still harder

Tags: artwork, branding, get invovled

A while ago, we asked for designs to accompany our KDE Software Labels.

We’ve already got some excellent ideas on the wiki and there will be a Dot article quite soon with one last call for artwork and setting out the process for choosing the best. In the meantime, it’s not too late to add your design.

If you submitted a design already, then hopefully you got a message from me thanking you and providing some additional guidance – in particular we’d like some horizontal web-banner like variations. If you are the Ivan who submitted an idea or you know who he is please get in touch (drop a comment here is fine or you can find my email address on the About page here). If you’re about to submit a design please give us a way of contacting you.

Tags: artwork, branding, get invovled

It has been really encouraging to see how much of the rebranding is sticking already – the better known news sites seem to be generally reporting the first beta of KDE Software Compilation 4.4 rather than KDE 4.4, but… well you knew there would be a “but”, right?

Well here it is: If you used to use “KDE” don’t just replace it with “KDE SC”

At least, not always… I’ve noticed a few people – and even your KDE Promo team is not immune from this – apparently being a little confused about what terms to use. People are trying to be good and not use “KDE” alone but in some instances this leads to a little overuse of KDE SC when that’s not really what is meant.

I just had a quick scan through Planet KDE for examples and I’m going to pick on Björn’s excellent post about icon usability (if you didn’t already, please complete the test). Not because it’s bad – or necessarily even wrong at all – but because I think it’s a nice example of subtlety in thinking carefully about what we mean. In that post, he says:

We want KDE SC to be usefull for everyone in the world. So, do our icons and our terms work for everyone in the world?

So, what’s wrong with that? Not necessarily anything. The question is, does he really mean we want only the SC to be useful for everyone in the world? We’ll never do a usability survey for Amarok icons? So perhaps the better term would be “KDE software” rather than “KDE SC”.

Björn’s post is a case in point because the error (if any) is very small and subtle, but there are a few other examples I’ve seen that do appear to show more confusion. I won’t pick on anyone here, but here are a few examples of sentences using old and new terminologies to show that we don’t want to just replace “KDE” with “KDE SC”:

Old: “I use KDE”
New: “I use KDE software” or “I use KDE SC (4.4)” or “I use KDE Plasma Desktop (4.4)”

Use whichever one you really mean.

Old: “KDE is great – just look at how cool Digikam is”
New: “KDE software is great – just look at how cool digiKam is” or “KDE (community) is great – they made digiKam”

Just think – are you talking about the community or the software?

Old: “KDE is the best, it has Kontact, cool widgets and desktop effects”
New: “KDE software is the best – for example Kontact, the Plasma Desktop widgets and desktop effects” or “Plasma Desktop is the best – you have all those cool widgets and desktop effects” or “KDE Software Compilation is the best – it comes with all the Plasma Desktop widgets and effects and great apps like Kontact”

Old: “I want to make an app, should I use KDE or Gnome or plain Qt?”
New: “I want to make an app, should I use the KDE Platform, or Gnome or plain Qt?”

Old: “KDE 4 sucks and I’m switching to Gnome until there’s a KDE 4 K3B”
New: “KDE SC 4 sucks, I can’t even get a KDE Platform 4 version of K3B to fit in with it, Gnome forever” or “KDE Platform 4 sucks, no K3B yet, Vista for me” or “Plasma Desktop 4 sucks, there isn’t even a complementary version of K3B. I’m going back to CDE.”

See, you can even use the right terms when trolling

Old: “Nepomuk is one of the most exciting developments in KDE 4″
New ” Nepomuk is one of the most exciting parts of the KDE Platform 4″ or “Nepomuk is one of the most interesing things in KDE SC 4″

Old: “Amarok is an awesome KDE app”
New: “Amarok is an awesome KDE app”

Some things change, but some things stay the same

So, this is really an internal thing – perhaps you post to the Planet or write about KDE elsewhere. If so, and you support our efforts at clarifying our branding, please try and think about what it is you mean and use the right terms. If we simply replace “KDE” with “KDE SC” then we won’t have achieved anything. We don’t want KDE SC used everywhere, if we did we’d have given it a catchier name

There is, as always, more to do. Nathan Ogden has done some really great work (with assistance from others on KDE-Promo) putting together a guide for distros on how to use our brands in their communication. We need to get the word on that out to our distro contacts (something I should be helping with – perhaps you can help?) so that it’s as easy as possible for us all to work together and present things in a consistent way.

Any other examples? Queries about the above? “I hate the rebranding” rants? Please post below

Tags: background, branding

Long promised, we finally got around to setting up a poll (down on the right hand side) to guide us in choosing a label(s) to recommend to third party application developers who would like to associate their applications with either the KDE Community or KDE Platform.

So go to KDE Apps, vote and help us choose.

Tags: branding, poll

So, the announcement on repositioning the KDE brand has been out for a few days now…

I must say that I’ve been very encouraged by the response – on the Dot at least. Lots of questions (most of which I think we’ve been able to answer quite well as the majority of them are things that already came up in our discussions), a healthy dose of skepticism (I like that, as a scientist skepticism is good as long as it is open to reasoned argument) and a general sense that we haven’t really changed that much. The latter point is important because it suggests that we are succeeding in simply being more clear about defining things in a way that many of us already see them: KDE is the people and we produce some cool stuff. So it’s not so much about rebranding as simply making our brands fit better with reality.

I particularly liked Lydia’s post about what KDE means to her and Nuno’s nice summary:

I’ve also become briefly (in)famous as the “KDE spokesperson” who said all this stuff about our brands. I wonder if the person who used that phrase gets that KDE doesn’t really have appointed spokespeople, though I guess we’re all spokespeople when we’re writing about KDE in public, particularly in places like the Dot that the news sites read. I suspect that they just need to present to their (business oriented?) readership that the news is somehow official and perhaps “community member” would not have been understood. One news site of dubious quality even called me “KDE representative royalty”

So, we’ve finally made the announcement, now we need to crack on with the hard of work of getting this structure out in our communications, talking to our downstream distributors to advise them how to refer to our software and a myriad of other things, some of which we probably haven’t even thought of. Work is ongoing on the kde-promo mailing list and on the community wiki. Come and join us if you’d like to help.

Tags: branding, community, promotion