This is based on a blogpost of mine. I thought it might be interesting to share and potentially discuss it here.
I always wondered why open source projects love community-driven logo competitions (almost all logos of Wikimedia projects seem to have been created this way).
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I suggest that the practice of community-driven logo competitions in open source communities makes a lot of sense if the logo is primarily a representation of the project to people who are already community members. Thus, the project logo is similar to the emblem of a football club: It needs to appeal to fans of the club itself. Whether it appeals to fans of other clubs or even non-fans in general is not relevant.
The community of an open source project is community/users/creators all in union 2; thus representation to non-members is not a large concern as long as members are doing well and identify with the project and its representations (like a logo).
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This is very different for logos for non-open source projects like commercial products. In these cases, the logos are created primarily as representation to non-members of the product-creating organization.
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Logo-competitions among amateurs might lead, from the perspective of the designer, to flawed designs. But they seem to work well in the context of values and concerns in open source projects as they create identification for the community from the community.
An aspect that I did not discuss in depth in the original post is that voting is a mechanism that “ensures a decision is made even if no clear “best” logo can be decided upon by rational means.”. It am curious why designs get voted on and code not; the most plausible explaination is that code, as a core “thing” an open source community groups around is often thought to have a value that members can find out in a rational discussion, whereas members might not have the skill to judge designs nor the assumption that one could even rationally decide about such “matters of taste” as a design (in contrast to code)
I’ve often thought of a similar(?) aspect of design and code in OSS in that code to some extent is either correct or not correct in that is runs the intended function (success) or does not (fail). The code can be ‘refined’ and made more efficient.
Design doesn’t really have an equivalent to ‘runs function successfully’ or ‘does not run function successfully’. The closest I think are accessibility standards. e.g. Does this logo meet accessibility standards? - everything else could be objective re. ‘good’ design’ that ‘passes’ quality control.
So like, if the community likes a visual style that isn’t what ‘typical’ design would call ‘good design’ then well…it ‘runs’ so what kind of importance does ‘good’ design hold.
That code is special in that it “runs or not”, is something that Dunguid discusses in “Peer production and “laws of quality”” (I cite this paper a normal amount…): A lot of online peer production is modeled on open source development, yet code-development methods are not 1:1 translatable to other cultural products.
There is some effort of making cultural products code-like, but I am of the impression that a lot of the efforts do not care for the professions they try to code-ify: Writing in LaTeX does not lead to quality and efficiency improvements; there are reasons why designs are not branched and merged but copy-and-pasted. (Also, code-ification is not merely computable, it is also plain text; classic smalltalk with its non-plain-text-store does not fit in the git-and-vim world)
Wiki* project logos are a very intersting case to test ideas about open source created logos, also since it is rather well documented.
An example with some historical relevant are the 2001 Wikipedia Logo suggestions. There are some glaring problems from the perspective of graphic design, but also some very period-typical design choices.
What is interesting to me is that metaphors or other associations to Wikipedia are often combined: globe+quote; books as letter W, etc. This also shows in the 2003 Wikipedia Logo suggestions: brackets+flower; book+bird, ant+book. However, there are also single-metaphor logos around ideas of a network or a book. Interestingly, the 2nd and 3rd place in the final voting were reused later as logos of Mediawiki (the Software) and the Wikimedia Foundation.
I think it was pure luck in the end since the runner-up was quite problematic. I think it would be nice to see how often there’s actually no competition once there is a really nice candidate. I mean, you really want to have a hard time picking a winner, don’t you? But often with logo competitions of this type what I see is 10 really bad ones and then 1 that stands out.
Unsure if the hobbes-quote-ball was an obvious winner – from a graphic design perspective of that time, 5/7 seem to be more professional! BUT the problem with that one was probably that, while looking good, it was not good at triggering discussion and community identification.
This is an interesting discussion. We struggled with this when starting Simple.org about 5 years ago.
I had worked with Mozilla on the Firefox brand way back in 2004 and it always felt weird to have the logo created by a handful of selected designers (Jon Hicks, Steven Horlander, Steven Garritty, Stephen Desroches, myself and few others) with a bit of community input but not really ‘by the community.’ The end-result was pretty iconic! But, the process didn’t feel terribly inclusive. Jon wrote about the process a bit here: Firefox Logo - Hicks.design
Mozilla also had challenges with previous logos that had been created. The Mozilla dino (made by Shepard Fairey!) was cool but literally couldn’t be changed because it was ‘owned’ by one person. Likewise, the early iconography for Phoenix (the browser that became Firefox) was created by one Swedish guy who wouldn’t let other people change them. That obviously felt antithetical to open source.
For Simple, I wanted it to be a group effort, clearly voluntary, and no one could ‘own’ the design. I wrote about the process a bit here: Open source brand for Simple Simple This was a ‘competition’ but a collaborative one with no ‘winners’. The final result was the combination of many people’s ideas.
I still am unclear what the right way to do this:
Should logo designers be paid?
Should a logo be created by committee? (usually not a great recipe for an opinionated and great identity)
Who should judge if a logo is great for the project? Again, maybe not a committee? Who is the creative director of an open source project?
How do you replicate a typical ‘identity’ creation process in an open source way?
How do you manage ‘ownership’ and changes to an identity. There are challenging copyright issues. You can’t just ‘open source’ an identity the same way as code or icons. (Chris Messina and I had a long discussion with a copyright lawyer about this in SF a long time ago — the TL/DR is that copyright law is pretty basic, well-settled, and not flexible for something like an ‘open source’ identity).
