The ongoing Fedora Forum discussion

So here's a snippet from this thread on FedoraForum.org, from jspaar: "But trying to spin this like it was an open process in which the community was highly involved? As Greg DeK. spelled out in the marketing list discussion, he has paid a professional to do it according to Red Hat's specs, and he has signed off on the result (allowing for minor tweaks) before 99% of the "community" has even become aware that it existed." (http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showpost.php?p=370607&postcount=69) This is a fair point -- to an extent. We wanted enough input to validate the direction the logo should take. The mechanism we used to gather that input was the Fedora marketing list. Why? Because this is *precisely* why the Fedora marketing group exists. And yes, that *necessarily* excludes 99% of the Fedora community -- but it *includes* the 1% who care enough about the direction of Fedora's brand to get *directly* involved. And *those* people were *highly* involved in the process around this decision. These people were submitting logo ideas -- some good, some not-so-good, some not-at-all-good -- for *months* before we commissioned this version -- and that *very* active debate *directly* informed Matt's choices, as he made clear in his top-notch presentation. But, y'know, it's not code. It's a logo. In code, it's frequently the case that "one way is better." In design, that's *almost never* the case. Therefore, our process was to: 1. Gather input; 2. Designate someone to create the logo; 3. Validate the logo. It was all done completely transparently, too. And because there are roughly as many people who like the logo as who hate the logo, and because that is generally true with *any* design task (as most designers will tell you), and because people generally respect the thought process that led to the logo, the logo is probably a winner. Matt Munoz, the talented designer who came up with it, has the final say at this point -- because as jspaar also points out, "benevolent dictatorship is necessary or nothing gets decided." In this case, that guy is Matt. That's basically my last word on the matter. Feel free to repost links to this message all over teh intraweb. --g _____________________ ____________________________________________ Greg DeKoenigsberg ] [ the future masters of technology will have Community Relations ] [ to be lighthearted and intelligent. the Red Hat ] [ machine easily masters the grim and the ] [ dumb. --mcluhan