[Marketing] extending the logo to a local chapter

[Michael P. Gerlek]

Jason's got it right.  I think I wrote the initial draft of those guidelines, and it was never our intention to support changing the core logo itself.

(This is, as Jason says, a basic rule of branding.  At least until such time as we achieve market saturation and ubiquity: at that point, we can start doing holiday-themed riffs like GOOG :-)

-mpg


-----Original Message-----
From: marketing-bounces at lists.osgeo.org [mailto:marketing-bounces at lists.osgeo.org] On Behalf Of Jason Birch
Sent: Tuesday, January 06, 2009 8:53 AM
To: marketing at lists.osgeo.org
Subject: RE: [Marketing] extending the logo to a local chapter

Michael wrote:

> I'm thinking something you can add a box next to the compass logo
> (like for Associate Member, etc), and we give a color palette
> for that, but not change the compass itself?

My take: the logo is a stylized mark / special form of our trademark.
It is also our "public face" for a majority of users.  Allowing local
modifications of the image or the text "OSGeo" is counter to a
consistent branding strategy and trademark management best practices.
 
Our policy regarding the logo portion of our trademark appears to have
been changed by the marketing committee as part of the redesign (?):

http://www.osgeo.org/logos/

"To use any of the other version you need to have a mandate to do so.
This applies for OSGeo projects, software in incubation, sponsorship or
a local chapter. Especially for local chapters feel free to modify and
integrate the OSGeo logo components into whatever you already had.
Ideally you send your version ot the Marketing Committee so that they
can have a look at whether our corporate or foundational identity is
still recognizable."

I'm not sure that this change is entirely within Marketing's mandate,
and is in clear conflict with our trademark guidelines:

http://www.osgeo.org/content/foundation/legal/trademark_guidelines.html

"The OSGeo trademarks include: the name The Open Source Geospatial
Foundation; the name OSGeo; the name OSGeo.org; the OSGeo compass logo.
OSGeo's trademarks should be used in their exact form, including
capitalization -- neither abbreviated nor combined with any other word
or words (e.g. "OSGeo" rather than "osgeo" or "OS GEO", "Open Source
Geospatial Foundation" rather than "OSGeo Foundation", etc)."

The initial guidelines were very clear on how not to modify the logo on
page 9:
 http://www.osgeo.org/files/viscom/branding/OSGeo_logo_guide.pdf

I think that relaxing this to allow for changes to the tagline is fine,
and have no problem with OSGeo being relaxed about "remixes" of the logo
for unofficial use, but the kinds of modifications we've seen from local
chapters so far, in my opinion, should not be allowed for official use.

Jason
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