It's been 2 months of travelling and moving but I am finally now in Athens, Ohio, a pleasant liberal town in a sea of rural conservativeness. Things are not as lively here as they were in Belo Horizonte but I can't say I'll miss the air pollution or the idiocy of the Brazilian upper middle class.
Yesterday the marketing team had its first official IRC meeting on #marketing. The goal was to discuss how to pursue our nascent promotional efforts and I think we successfully did so. The plan for the next few months is to grow the amount of promotional material around one theme: GNOME, software for everyone. The consensus was that we should start relatively small by moving towards a better representation of the project in traditional FOSS circles – LUG members, students. Look for a Super Bowl ad in 2006 but not earlier.
For the time being, “software for everyone” is a theme more than a slogan. But it might stick. Its polysemy – “software designed so that anyone can use it” and “free software available to anyone” – is actually growing on me. That theme is to be developed around three points: freedom, ease of use, and accessibility. Stylistically there is no formal definition of what we’re trying to achieve. Successful designs will survive.
The marketing list has been discussing the creation of posters for volunteers to print and take with them wherever they present the GNOME project, typically at conferences and other public events of the same kind. I’ve created a few which I’ll review in more details. What they all have in common is:
Identity posters: these have no other purpose than to communicate GNOME’s presence somewhere. There’s barely any designing here… shame on me.
Augmented identity posters: same as above but with a little bit of text giving the briefest of introductions to the GNOME project. The text is loosely based on wgo’s “What is GNOME?” It could easily be replaced with something better.
“The GNOME project provides two things: the GNOME desktop, an intuitive and attractive desktop environment for corporate and home users, and the GNOME development platform, an extensive framework for building applications. Volunteers, software developers, documentation writers, artists, translators, all work together to make GNOME easy to use, accessible, powerful, innovative and just plain great. Corporations have also joined in the effort and now provide additional resources for the project as well as professional support for GNOME users and developers. Thanks to the GNOME project hundreds of thousands of people worldwide have successfully begun using free software.”
Bonus gizmo poster: Say you’re selling GNOME t-shirts or you have a list of presentations to announce… use a marker and the bonus gizmo poster™ and make your own poster. ;-)
Whimsical posters: These last two I designed for myself more than for public use. It was suggested on the marketing list that posters could have some kind of slogan on them which is not a bad idea except that, as far as I know, there isn’t an official “slogan” for the GNOME project. This didn’t prevent me however from thinking about what more elaborate posters could look like.
The “gentleman’s desktop” idea is something I’ve read somewhere though I cannot remember if it was on a mailing list, in somebody’s blog or in an interview. I really like the idea though I realize of course that it is sexist and unpleasantly plutocratic. Bear in mind then that it is not part of the “official” proposal but merely the result of my indulging my elitist European male fiber. ;-)
The “official desktop of happy people” idea I’m very fond of and I believe it’s a communication avenue worth exploring. It takes the focus away from the technical and political issues to present instead the human and affective aspects of the project. Usability, accessibility, i18n have all been successfully integrated into the development of GNOME at a technical level. That’s an important factor of GNOME’s success and something which should be emphasized because users can relate to it as individuals and as members of a group. Rationally convincing people that using GNOME is a good decision is great. Not having to convince them of the same because they are emotionally drawn to it wouldn’t be bad either.
The text at the bottom of both posters is dummy text by the way. If you’re interested in downloading the PDF versions of all 7 posters, they’re available at www.viralata.net/gnome/promotion/.
Today is a historic date for Free/Open Source software. It is the day Mozilla Firefox 1.0 was released to the world. Internet Explorer, its “competitor,” is still the most widely used browser on the net but Firefox, which has already conquered the hearts and minds of web developers, is also slowly making its way into the hard drives of regular people. More importantly I believe that it is also acting as an ambassador for F/OS software. It is showing that F/OS software is alive, relevant, and credible. So while I’m glad that today the world was made aware that it has the option not to use a crappy browser, I’m also especially happy to see the idea that software is not just whatever Microsoft made Dell or Gateway ship with their computers strengthened by this particular event.
And now, on to GNOME stuff. These past few days I’ve had no time to work on the GNOME marketing tasks I had set for myself. But I’ve had time to consider some ways to reach a broader audience and one thing became clear to me while reflecting on Firefox and OpenOffice’s recent good fortunes: the best way to market GNOME is to forget about marketing it.
Like GNOME, Firefox and OpenOffice are useful, functional, well designed, usable pieces of software – with varying degrees of success of course but that’s not the point. GNOME is unique though in that it works on operating systems which, though full of qualities, are minority systems. Microsoft Windows has roughly 95% of the desktop market and Mac OS X 3%. Linux, the BSDs and Solaris – all GNOME systems which I’ll just refer to as Unices from now on – have the rest.
The good news is that much of the market, Microsoft’s share specifically, is up for grabs. Linux has shown that it could occupy a significant percentage of the market in the server space. Many believe that it could do it again with the desktop market. I, of course, believe it too. The bad news… well, I suppose it is that there’s a long road ahead. The bad news for GNOME is that it can’t go anywhere on its own and that it’s dependent on the success of its host operating systems. That unfortunate fact is something the GNOME marketing team cannot ignore and which will always limit it. So what can it do?
I believe that it should shift its efforts from marketing GNOME to marketing GTK+. The “GIMP Toolkit” happens to be one of the elements of GNOME’s technical foundation but it’s also more than that. It’s a complete multi-platform toolkit. Clearly only a very specific segment of the population has any use for a GUI toolkit but what matters is that this segment exists within the full desktop operating system market and not only within the 2% or so of the current GNOME host operating system market. By promoting GTK+ the GNOME marketing team would increase its target audience significantly and instantly. That’s already something to consider. But there’s more.
The GNOME marketing team ought to think about how to best use its limited resources: it could try to market GNOME and find itself selling Unices instead or it could market GTK+ and use that initiative to show off GNOME and draw people to it. Scenario #1 involves getting into the complexities of selling a platform radically different from the dominant one. That means addressing issues like hardware support, switching costs, transfer of custom software, and all that icky stuff. I believe that’s a job best left to vendors. Let RedHat, Novell, or Sun do the heavy lifting since they can’t afford not to do it.
Scenario #2 involves promoting something the team is familiar with and which it can manage. For the most part it’s about developers talking to developers whereas in the first scenario you’d have to address a wide audience – managers, admins, end-users, etc. – on a variety of topics. So not only would the former path require greater sophistication and research, it would also require more volunteers and more efforts. With the GTK+ option, the message is simpler and probably truer to GNOME’s core constituency.
Marketing GTK+ is not only important because of the interest it could create in GNOME; it’s also crucial because it will increase the number of people writing for the platform. While GTK+ is not “the GNOME development platform,” it is the closest thing to it and bridging the gap between the two will be easier than having people making the jump all at once. The importance of GNOME and GTK+ bindings in reaching this goal should be obvious to anyone familiar with the platform. That is certainly the case of the Mono guys who have, better than anyone else I believe, understood the necessity to create a GNOME-friendly multi-platform culture. To some they might have made controversial political decisions. To me, they have adopted exactly the right kind of attitude.
This proposal is obviously a bit twisted. I’d be asking people to work on one thing when they’re really interested in working on another. But I’m convinced that it’s the most efficient way to go: GTK+’s target audience is much much much greater than GNOME’s at the moment, it is homogenous, the marketing team is familiar with it, and as for the message to communicate, focusing on GTK+ is probably much more straightforward than dealing with GNOME and the platform issues.
I’ve always been attracted to sports imagery. I find it daring – if sometimes brash and tacky – and expressive especially in its typography. It’s a guilty pleasure: large commercial lettering, loud colors… it’s far from what I’m normally drawn to. But I admire people who can design that way and who are not afraid of overdoing it. Stylistically it looks to me like a direct derivative from old-fashion commercial sign painting for which I have a soft spot.
When I was a kid, right across the street from my elementary school, there was a commercial sign shop. It closed down a long time ago but I still remember exactly what it looked like, its dark green façade and its beautiful hand-painted white letters on the window. I also remember my father explaining to me what that guy’s job was and how great it was that someone could still make a living that way. I think he too has a soft spot for hand lettering which he passed on to me.
I don’t know for sure but I’m guessing that sign painting is now a lost art in France. Living in Brazil though I have the privilege to see it alive everyday. The streets here are full of hand painted signs: store front advertising, commercial banners suspended above and across the streets – it’s illegal to hang banners in the streets in Belo Horizonte but it’s still done – political signs, etc… They’re everywhere. Though most of them are unremarkable some do stand out, often more by their size and color than by the quality of the lettering. Maybe I’m a complete weirdo but I do enjoy walking passed a giant blue “A” or a huge red “S”
But back to my initial point… I’ve been thinking for while now about experimenting with replacing the modern, glossy, and minimalist look of computer graphics with the loud and popular aesthetics of expensive team sports. What would that be like? Something like this perhaps:
The GNOME Marketing list is discussing ways to define and reach its target audience. But what are we going to propose to the public to identify GNOME visually and to connect with it? I know it’s a side issue, mere promotion, but it’s a stimulating one for me. I’ve proposed in the past to create GNOME posters which belong stylistically to the standard sleek computer graphic design genre. I didn’t do it to imitate anything or anyone. It just came out that way because that minimalism is a part of me. But after it I also felt compelled to try something different which challenged not only my designing habits but also my assumption about the way to communicate my enthusiasm and my hopes for GNOME.
Now, if only CafePress offered dark red t-shirts!
I finished the Letter size version of “Why Choose GNOME?.” A4 versions in French and in English are still available; see this post: “Why Choose GNOME?” Out In PDF.
Viralata.net’s previous white and gray design is no more. I got rid of it because I was getting tired of it, because it looked too web-like, and because I wanted to experiment with web typography. It’s still pretty minimalist but it’s also more textured: there’s a tiled background and a basic serif font working together to create richer and fuller looking pages than with the previous black sans-serif on plain white background. That’s partly what I mean when I say that I wanted something that wasn’t so web-like. I wanted to capture the feel of a printed paper page.
The default font size is much larger (12 points) than usual and the traditional blue and purple links have been replaced by a dark red (#a60000) and a dark gray (#333333). Playing with link colors is not something I would normally do. But since this is my personal site I can relax a bit and ignore the more conservative guidelines for good web design. I have nothing to sell on viralata.net and the site is small enough that I don’t expect anyone to feel lost and curse me for not playing by the rules.
The more unusual decision for me was to work with fixed point sizes, especially for fonts. While this goes against my normal preference for relative units, I figured that, once again, this being a personal site, I could bend the rules. Firefox and Opera are both able to display this new design at greater or smaller font sizes; I imagine that Safari can too. Unsurprisingly, Internet Explorer cannot but I can’t say that I care.
Using fixed point sizes helped me gain some control over the structure of the page. I have tried to play that element up by paying special attention to the space between lines, paragraphs and headers. I further tried to control the color of the page by redefining the strong and b tags not as indicators for bold weight but as red “ink.” I hope that I was able that way to create a contrast without disrupting the unity of the textblock.
The design of newer PDF versions of “Why Choose GNOME?” and “Pourquoi choisir GNOME ?” is done. I made a few typographical corrections on the first French version and modified the original English text to bring both documents closer to each other visually. Both are formatted for printing on A4 paper; a North-American-friendly Letter size version should be out soon.
The GNOME Marketing list has woken up from its torpor which is excellent news.
Continuing my work with GNOME promotional material, I designed the following three posters. They are large (1189 × 841 mm; 46 ¾ × 33 in), black and white, and somewhat plain. Their size is meant to draw people in when groups of volunteers are presenting the project at trade shows and conferences. They are black and white to keep production costs low. They are plain because I wouldn’t know how to design them otherwise and I like them that way. ;-)
The theme is “values of the GNOME Project” which I chose to define with those three words: freedom, intelligence, respect. Each word actually represents several of the qualities GNOME embodies. I still have to write the short texts detailing what those are. “Freedom” should explain the benefits of GNOME’s GPL and LGPL licenses. “Intelligence” should illustrate the ways in which GNOME strives to be a smart, integrated, easy-to-use environment. “Respect” should be about the importance of interoperability, accessibility and internationalization.
To give you an idea of how large these posters are, I marked on a scaled-down image of one of them an area which is shown full-size, on a 300 DPI export, next to it. What you’re seeing is a footer which appears on all posters and reads “The GNOME Desktop and Developer Platform – www.gnome.org.”
