Kickstarting the Neos brand

[brgmn]

I’m starting to like this discussion… But at the end I’m not part of the Neos Team and, you will have to decide these things. If you won’t take a decision here, your users, developers, customers, press,… will do it in some beautiful artistic ways you can’t imagine (realworld example attached):

For me this “brand thread” is a perfect example of “how to take decisions as a team”. @bwaidelich had some nice ideas to implement a solid web based decision process - just go for it!

I know this is really straight forward, but… yes: YOU AS A TEAM (EVERY SINGLE MEMBER) COULD VOTE HOW THIS SHALL BE DECIDED wooohooo

In the meantime you can give me a +1 (use the button) if you like me to push my logo drafts further - e.g. by building some real, cleaned EPS-files you can build upon.

[bwaidelich]

I would feel better if you all had no time for this

Well… After spending hours writing documentation, fixing bugs, reviewing changes, installing Windows(!) I felt like changing the topic for a few minutes…

@brgmn Personally I found it great if you (and others) continue sharing drafts and ideas. But especially as source of inspiration and for discussion, so no need to create EPS files just yet IMO

[hifish]

The logo is derived from the idea of florian (slack) to have a blue rotated square, where the left big square stands for the neos (site) node, the others for the page nodes, plugins, … or see it as neos node and all the possible distributed Resources, ….

The Logo itself is can be regarded recursive, the more you zoom in, the more little squares may appear. On the other hand, the smaller the logo is used, the squares will melt into each other, having only one blue square for a the size of a favicon, …

One more thing, all squares (except the biggest = neos one) kann be colored to handle the suggestion from rasmusskjoldan of a morphing logo. So the squares can also represent the used technologies (git, composer, …), or Libraries, Applications, Plugins, …

[dfeyer]

I like a lots the “creativity” or “lego” vision of the product. neos is not just a brand, it’s a community attached to well crafted piece of software (who say handcrafted), and open to challenge.

And because 2AM is a perfect time for a whisky and a logo with a serif font, here is mine mixed up with @kitsunet greek letter idea:

Have a good night, dear community

[dfeyer]

Any news on the brand topic ?

[robert]

I briefly talked with @daniel about it yesterday. As I see it, the identity process is necessary, and it doesn’t have to be a year-long archetype journey. But I think creating a – rather random – logo won’t help us in the long term; then it’s still better to not use a logo at all.

Rasmus said that he doesn’t really have time and then is on vacation, but I don’t know if / how available he will be even after his holidays. I think we need to push things now already and need someone who knows enough about branding processes to guide us and keep things rolling. Daniel for example?

In my opinion we should strive for having a basic visual design ready in 2-3 months from now.

[christianm]

2-3 months is already pretty long in my eyes. But yes that is definitely needed. And yes we need some identity, which goes together with the future direction of Neos IMHO. So when do we do this? IMHO needs to be done ASAP.

[kapale]

I also think 2-3 month are too long. Even the current “not a Neos logo” could become a logo in the meantime, because of the current design. If it takes more time till the finished logo is ready, then maybe a regular font would be better. In this case you wouldn’t think that it IS a logo, or at least less.

[aertmann]

I also agree we need something rather soonish, but also second it should be a minimum for the first iteration. It will also influence the design of the new website. We do have a color palette already, which we could stick to if we want. However I agree it’s good to have a logo that can be used in white/black/monochrome as well. I would be fine with a simple logo with just a N as Robert suggests, as I also suggested earlier in a internal re-branding document.

Here are some examples:

N logo

https://dribbble.com/shots/1345587-Wip

Negative Reality Logo Design

NS

https://dribbble.com/shots/1784181-N-Logo-Concept

N mark

We can smooth it. We have the technology.

http://www.shutterstock.com/s/n/search.html

But personally I’d like to see more suggestions for logos from actual designers, although I’m don’t know how to manage such a process nor how to guide it.

I’d like to add that communication wise we’ve started to adopt a cheerful and fun mood and we should strive to incorporate that in the CI.

We shouldn’t postpone anything regarding the 2.0 release due to this process however.

Also I agree the identity should be completely independent from the old one.

[cognifloyd]

Sarah Floyd, my fantastic wife, drew this Neos logo. The first image has what’s next to the N hidden, the second doesn’t. It’s supposed to be an easy connected network with simple, direct ways to do whatever you need to do. The lettering is inspired by the greek letters: νέος (or at least as they look on https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/νέος )

[robert]

thanks! That looks nice, but in my opinion it doesn’t fit with the identity of the Neos project.

[robert]

@aertmann you had a session talking about the logo and website here at T3DD15. Can you give us a short summary? (maybe in a new thread)

[daniel]

Repost of what I have to say about the visual identity at this point in time: Of course you can invest time at the sprint in everything the project entails, but I believe the investment yields the best results when you focus on getting the basis right. That is what more or less everybody needs to see, that the team is able to deliver that. This is rooted in my expectation of a brand’s integrity level. I strongly believe in a holistic view of brands, which in Neos’ case IMHO means that you need to solve a trust problem which is caused by a history of overselling vs under delivering. So I keep stressing that the team needs to deliver a stable 2.0 with documentation, because that is the value the brand needs. Only when that has been done (and widely recognized), the stage is set for a new visual identity that doesn’t risk appearing as hollow. There is technical debt, the move to a new license and Github which hasn’t been delivered yet. As I said in Munich a few months ago: you can decide to say that Neos will stay a concept and keep innovating regardless of (substantial) market relevance. Or you can focus on making Neos (really) ready for production and in that case that means a change of culture, but also the closing of a bleeding wound. When that bleeding has been stopped, I think it’s time for showing that new found healthiness off with a new logo and website.

[robert]

I think that tackling the brand is actually quite urgent. Just a few minutes ago I received an email by a Neos agency, writing:

we realize here on all fronts that we really, really need the Neos logo (starting with trade fair stand, flyers for conferences we participate in, up to stationery). Is there any news on that?

You’re right that the developers should rather focus on developing the product. But that’s exactly why I frequently ask for more help, also from you side. I think you could lead the branding effort without having to take away a lot of time from the remaining team. What the Neos Team basically needs to do is answer questions. The rest can be organised by non-developers.

[cognifloyd]

You’re right that the developers should rather focus on developing the product. But that’s exactly why I frequently ask for more help, also from you side. I think you could lead the branding effort without having to take away a lot of time from the remaining team.

The developers will tackle problems that seem important. If someone else is visibly making progress towards creating the visual identity, then they won’t spend as much time on it.

Sarah (I posted her version of the Neos logo above) is not very technically inclined. She is, however, an artist. Our walls are covered with her paintings, so coming up with something visual to help Neos seemed like a natural way for her to participate. When I showed her the “not a logo” the other day, she suggested she could make one. It only took me time to talk about Neos and then a moment to upload the pics. So, it didn’t really take anything away from any development/documentation I could do.

@daniel Is there something that people like Sarah can do to participate in the branding process? She can’t develop so it won’t take effort away from that.

[david.sporer]

I really like the general concept of this draft though I think that it should be “cleaner”.
But the idea with the epsilon is really good I think.

I’m not the graphics guy also but what I’d appreciate for the new Neos and Flow CI is a lighter color scheme. The current one is too dark I think and it looks much friendlier if there are more light colors in the CI in general.
Don’t know if that’s a naive thought but aren’t there perhaps agencies that are willing to contribute a logo?
I was looking for a new graphics agency last year and just wrote to the T3MUC mailing list asking if anyone knows good agencies and got about 5 answers in an hour and I know of at least 2 agencies here that are also doing Neos workshops that would definitely be capable of creating stunning logos.

[robert]

Just to stress this again: I’m all in favour of distilling the identity first before we think of an actual visual implementation. I think it just doesn’t make sense to discuss logo designs before we roughly agreed on (that is, having it written down and +1ed) what we want to express.

However, we just don’t have much time, so we need to tackle it as soon as possible.

[daniel]

@cognifloyd: Of course she can contribute and help in a very important way. As Robert pointed out, the foundation of a brand isn’t there yet. However such a thing can not be crafted, it needs to be distilled from what is there. If what is there doesn’t match who, how and what you want your brand to be, you need to work on the factual side first. Which is what I have been stressing all along. A convincing 2.0 will open a fresh page for everyone inside and outside of the core team and will leave enough room for aspirations that will now seem overstretched. So, first to close the gap between promises and deliverables, then we’ll huddle and come up with a briefing to unleash the designer power.

[david.sporer]

Yep I agree.
So just to give input about this as I haven’t read through the whole discussion just what I see as core values of Neos or what I have experienced so far.

• it really is a great community with extremely skilled people working on the products
• it’s at the edge of technology
• it makes life easier for editors and developers
• I’m working with Flow for about three years now and I really love this thing so at least for me it’s also an emotional thing to some point.

[wexi]

Perhaps something like this?