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1. Embed this notice
   Cassidy James :eos: :gg: :fh: (cassidy@mastodon.blaede.family)'s status on Friday, 14-Feb-2025 15:51:22 JST Cassidy James :eos: :gg: :fh:

   Friday night? Perfect time to drop a blog post that might sound like clickbait, but that I genuinely hope can help forge a path forward while making everyone happy—or at least pissing everyone off equally (sometimes the best you can ask for!)

   https://cassidyjames.com/blog/gnome-foot-logo-rebrand/

   #GNOME #OpenSource #Linux #GNOMEdesign

   • Embed this notice
     Brodie Robertson (brodieonlinux@mstdn.social)'s status on Friday, 14-Feb-2025 15:51:20 JST Brodie Robertson

     in reply to

     @cassidy The foot is a bit weird but at this point it's been the logo for so long that it feels even weirder without it. I don't think it's necessarily true that it doesn't convey anything about the project, it's such a distinct logo that it's hard to think of anything else besides GNOME

   • Embed this notice
     Neal Gompa (ニール・ゴンパ) :fedora: (conan_kudo@fosstodon.org)'s status on Friday, 14-Feb-2025 15:53:59 JST Neal Gompa (ニール・ゴンパ) :fedora:

     in reply to

     @cassidy The implication in your blog post is that it has to be different from the foot. What I'm saying is that we should explicitly not do that. A new iteration of the foot is fine, eliminating the foot is what I take issue with.

     Fedora went through a similar process a few years ago. A lot of effort was made to ensure we retained all the important aspects of the Fedora infinity logo iconography in the new one.

     A new GNOME logo mark should go along the same vein.

     Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell: likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     Cassidy James :eos: :gg: :fh: (cassidy@mastodon.blaede.family)'s status on Friday, 14-Feb-2025 15:54:00 JST Cassidy James :eos: :gg: :fh:

     in reply to

     • Neal Gompa (ニール・ゴンパ) :fedora:

     @Conan_Kudo the foot is quirky—and actively hard to work with. Rather than use a logo at all, we've repeatedly seen it just completely dropped from spaces _anyway_.

     Instead, I'm proposing we come up with something better, even if whimsical and quirky, but that actually works in the contexts we need to use it.

     I don’t think any of the modern GNOME design work has been “giving up the ‘personality’ of projects and communities.” In fact, quite the opposite as I feel like GNOME’s is strongest now.

   • Embed this notice
     Neal Gompa (ニール・ゴンパ) :fedora: (conan_kudo@fosstodon.org)'s status on Friday, 14-Feb-2025 15:54:01 JST Neal Gompa (ニール・ゴンパ) :fedora:

     in reply to

     @cassidy Yes, I did. I'm specifically responding that it's a bad idea to eliminate this from user-facing aspects of the project, product, and services.

     (As an aside, I definitely do not appreciate the assumption that I did not read the blog post before commenting. You know me better than that.)

   • Embed this notice
     Neal Gompa (ニール・ゴンパ) :fedora: (conan_kudo@fosstodon.org)'s status on Friday, 14-Feb-2025 15:54:02 JST Neal Gompa (ニール・ゴンパ) :fedora:

     in reply to

     @cassidy My issue with this is that by "professionalizing" it like this, you've essentially gutted any visibility of the community that the project actually *is*.

     Admittedly, I'm not a real GNOME person even though I've contributed a little bit to GNOME, but I used to be a heavy GNOME user. In general, I think giving up the "personality" of projects and communities leads to strictly worse products and services.

   • Embed this notice
     Cassidy James :eos: :gg: :fh: (cassidy@mastodon.blaede.family)'s status on Friday, 14-Feb-2025 15:54:02 JST Cassidy James :eos: :gg: :fh:

     in reply to

     • Neal Gompa (ニール・ゴンパ) :fedora:

     @Conan_Kudo did you read the blog post?

   • Embed this notice
     Maksym Hazevych (mks_h@mstdn.social)'s status on Friday, 14-Feb-2025 15:57:32 JST Maksym Hazevych

     in reply to

     • Brodie Robertson

     @BrodieOnLinux @cassidy also we like feet

   • Embed this notice
     Neal Gompa (ニール・ゴンパ) :fedora: (conan_kudo@fosstodon.org)'s status on Friday, 14-Feb-2025 16:00:43 JST Neal Gompa (ニール・ゴンパ) :fedora:

     in reply to

     @cassidy To be honest, I think that the existing trend is kind of disappointing. I have many thoughts about why it's happening, but it's too hard to organize right now at nearly 2am after a week of mental agony.

     I think there needs to be a step back and rethink about the progression of depersonalization that has been going on and find a new way to express things that acknowledge the project's roots and sense of community.

   • Embed this notice
     Neal Gompa (ニール・ゴンパ) :fedora: (conan_kudo@fosstodon.org)'s status on Friday, 14-Feb-2025 16:00:43 JST Neal Gompa (ニール・ゴンパ) :fedora:

     in reply to

     @cassidy For some time now, I've felt like there's this weird tension of feeling like a community vs feeling like a commercial product. And it shows up all over the project in different ways: overly generic names for applications and the UX trends in GNOME vs GNOME Circle vs community engagement vs contributor engagement, etc.

     Some of this is kind of normal given the makeup of GNOME contributors and what they do, but I feel like this was one of the outcomes of that tension.

     Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell: likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     Cassidy James :eos: :gg: :fh: (cassidy@mastodon.blaede.family)'s status on Friday, 14-Feb-2025 16:00:44 JST Cassidy James :eos: :gg: :fh:

     in reply to

     • Neal Gompa (ニール・ゴンパ) :fedora:

     @Conan_Kudo I just don’t see where in the post I suggest we gut the essence of what GNOME is, that we give up on personality, etc. That seems like a huge stretch from what I actually wrote, which is why I questioned if you’d read it. I’m explicitly saying we should retain personality, and I think I lay out a fairly natural evolution of *what the community has already been doing* design-wise.

   • Embed this notice
     Børge (forteller@tutoteket.no)'s status on Tuesday, 18-Feb-2025 09:03:09 JST Børge

     in reply to

     @cassidy Glad to see you put in a good word about stopping this whole full word upercase silliness. I've said this myself, and have very deliberately written #Gnome for a long time.