[openstack-dev] [tripleo] Fwd: TripleO mascot - how can I help your team?

Jeremy Stanley fungi at yuggoth.org
Thu Feb 16 19:54:38 UTC 2017


On 2017-02-16 14:09:53 -0500 (-0500), Dan Prince wrote:
[...]
> This isn't about aligning anything. It is about artistic control. The
> foundation wants to have icons their way playing the "community card"
> to make those who had icons they like conform. It is clear you buy into
> this.
> 
> Each team will have its own mascot anyway so does it really matter if
> there is some deviation in the mix? I think not. We have a mascot we
> like. It even fits the general requirements for OpenStack mascots so
> all we are arguing about here is artistic style really. I say let the
> developers have some leverage in this category... what is the harm
> really?
[...]

You're really reading far too much conspiracy into this. Keep in
mind that this was coming from the foundation's marketing team, and
while they've been very eager to interface with the community on
this effort they may have failed to some degree in explaining their
reasons (which as we all know leaves a vacuum where conspiracy
theories proliferate).

As I understand things there are some pages on the
foundation-controlled www.openstack.org site where they want to
refer to various projects/teams and having a set of icons
representing them was a desire of the designers for that site, to
make it more navigable and easier to digest. They place significant
importance on consistency and aesthetics, and while that doesn't
necessarily match my personal utilitarian nature I can at least
understand their position on the matter. Rather than just words or
meaningless symbols as icons they thought it would be compelling to
base those icons on mascots, but to maintain the aesthetic of the
site the specific renderings needed to follow some basic guidelines.
They could have picked mascots at random out of the aether to use
there, but instead wanted to solicit input from the teams whose work
these would represent so that they might have some additional
special meaning to the community at large.

As I said earlier in the thread, if you have existing art you like
then use that in your documentation, in the wiki, on team tee-shirts
you make, et cetera. The goal is not to take those away. This is a
simple need for the marketing team and foundation Web site designers
to have art they can use for their own purposes which meets their
relatively strict design aesthetics... and if that art is also
something the community wants to use, then all the better but it's
in no way mandatory. The foundation has no direct control over
community members' choices here, nor have they attempted to pretend
otherwise that I've seen.
-- 
Jeremy Stanley



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