Help us test the new Joomla! Brand Manual

After one year of working on the brand manual, which describes how to correctly use the Joomla! logo, we are now ready to share this work with all of you.

Along with Duke, leader of the Trademark team, and Jessica Dunbar, leader of the Marketing Working Group, we reviewed the topics of the brand manual and created a table of contents that is much more adequate for our needs than the 2005 brand manual.
It was not easy to put together all the guidelines, especially because the Joomla! community needs have changed during the last few years. Our aim was to create a practical guide that anybody can use and refer to, from designers to developers. In order to do that, we made sure that all the concepts are logical, relevant and comprehensive for any kind of user or any purpose.

A lot of “behind the scenes” work was done for the creation of the brand manual that took  a considerable amount of time and effort, like:

redefining the colour palette for a consistent reproduction of our logo throughout different media, finding new typographies that are open source and available in different languages (we shouldn’t forget we are a multilingual community),
retouching the wordmark in Asenine Wide and redefining the kerning, bowls and curves,defining proportions between the brandmark and wordmark, and adding the registered trademark symbol or TM where relevant.

We also better defined when to use the “gel version” of the logo versus the flat version of the logo, which is frequently used in our community due to the latest design trends. This part was completely missing from the old brand manual, creating a lot of confusion and inconsistency in the usage of the Joomla! signature.

Along with this detail-oriented job, a new set of files has been created for the Joomla! logo that you can find at this link. Feel free to download the folder and start using them.

Some specifications in matters that have been previously raised

For those of you who were afraid that we were going to ditch the 3D logo in favour of the widely-used flat one; we will keep using them both, but we ask you to use them consistently in your projects (i.e. - don’t mix the 3D logo with the flat logo in the same project).
Finally, for those of you who were expecting a big change in the font of our signature, we would like to spend a few lines here, saying why this is not possible at the moment. If we change our Asenine Wide for some other cool, customized typeface, we would need to spend money to register our logo again (that means a lot of money!). Also if we do so, we would like for more comprehensive work to be done on it, like creating a set of icons and a full range of fonts that all the community can use.

That said, it is not possible right now, but it could be a next step in the re-branding process.
 

Feedback and comments

At this point, please only send us comments and feedback that are pertinent to testing the brand manual: are concepts clearly explained and illustrated? Do you need more specifications on how to use the Joomla! signature?
Further more, special help is needed on the FAQs and glossary. Those are two new parts of the brand manual that we thought were important to add. They include the most common questions people have asked us and that I found myself to answer during my year as Brand Manager.
Most of the questions you ask in our forum thread will be added to those sections, and we want to make sure that answers are clear and use practical examples if required.

 

We want to thank all of you in advance for your effort and help in this.

You are invited to leave your feedback at the following forum topic.

 

 

 

Original author: Chiara