Open Branding for Open Source Projects

One of the really interesting things about working for Red Hat is the company's attention to detail. Everything about the way the company is presented to the world is decided upon. You can't just toss out any old picture of a guy in a red fedora... Shadowman's gotta have the exact look and feel. To help with that, there's an actual cool little branding book Red Hat's marketing department worked up that I use for lot of things: even camera angles on video interviews.

Such things are not just fun for the control freaks among us... consistency in the way things are presented help reduce friction and make it easier for any project--commercial or otherwise--to get their messaging out. The last thing you need is a lot of inconsistent look and feel in the materials you present to your community.

With that in mind, OSAS is pleased to present the first edition of the "Red Hat Community Brand Guide."

This document details the visual style and identity of a number of the upstream and downstream community projects we manage here within OSAS. as well as the messaging associated with those projects. This messaging describes the projects in multiple ways, including 25-, 50-, and 100-word descriptions projects can use to talk about any of the projects, as well as specific ways the projects integrate with each other.

Huge thanks go to Tuomas Kuosmanen for pulling the design elements together and Ruth Suehle for directing the efforts on this project!