[CREATE] consensus constitency persistence

[ricardo lafuente]

Hi Yuval,

Thanks for raising this issue. Now that some projects are gaining 
traction, it's the right time to discuss how the Libre Graphics 
community presents itself to the public.

I do have some reserves as to the proposed way to tackle this challenge. 
If i understand correctly, your idea is to set a fixed 'brand' for the 
Libre Graphics community, and a set of design guidelines to apply to 
most/all of the materials that are created for and from it.

In art school, i went through 2 years of corporate identity design. Even 
though LG is not a corporation but a community, what's being talked here 
is the creation (or rather, consolidation) of an identity. Identity 
guidelines and style manuals are commonplace in the corporate world, 
defining what you can and cannot do in order to style something as 
belonging to your 'brand'. This is because corporate image needs very 
clear boundaries so that new designers don't end up unwittingly tweaking 
the identity and creating confusion in brand recognition.

However, my impression is that this kind of 'top-down' identity 
definition might not be appropriate once we get out of a corporate 
context. Namely, i find it downplays the role that new designers might 
have in creating new directions for an identity by setting in stone some 
directives that they can't stray from.

Of course, one consequence of not having fixed and thorough style 
guidelines is that identity gets diluted according to the creative 
perspectives of different people. This in an issue for a company, but 
less so for a free-culture oriented community. I'm reminded of the 
discussion around OSP's logo proposal for LGM2010, which strayed from 
the de facto LGM identity so far (the ink splatter). That discussion was 
tremendously relevant to me, since it showed that the identity of an 
event or community is much more defined by what's done there, rather 
than its outward presentation. And that having multiple, coexisting 
perspectives on the graphic identity of the community might actually be 
a Good Thing(tm), even though it challenges principles that we're 
accostumed to when dealing with brands and identities.

It's very interesting to confront coding principles and graphic 
guidelines like you did (never thought of it that way), but i think 
those metaphors can only go so far. For instance, Linus's law -- "given 
enough eyes, all bugs are shallow" -- doesn't really apply to graphic 
work: not only do many cooks run the risk of spoiling the broth, but the 
'success' of a graphic piece is not measurable by efficiency guidelines, 
as lines of code can be. The same regarding your comparison to a 'coding 
style guide' -- their purpose is efficiency, since mixed writing styles 
make reading code harder; however, should we really constrain the 
decisions of designers who might join the boat later, and who might have 
something new and unexpected to introduce? Given your proposed 5-year 
timeframe, i think this is an issue.

You mentioned the danger of 'reinventing the wheel'. Again, i think this 
does not apply to creative and aesthetic perspectives, which are closer 
to an evolving and ever-changing set of loose (and often unwritten) 
guidelines like a cake recipe, than a functional tool such as a wheel or 
a hammer. No sense in reinventing the wheel, sure, but it's a good goal 
to aim for a tastier cake at each go. And since everyone's taste is 
their own, it's safe to say that no one cake will be ideal for each and 
every one of us -- which doesn't mean that we shouldn't keep on working 
on fancier recipes.

Finally, i think that one of the most rewarding parts in design work is 
having the freedom to experiment and express our own aesthetic 
perspectives -- which can seldom be described verbally or textually --, 
something that's simply not allowed in a context in which all decisions 
were made a priori, where the designer is not a decision-maker or 
creator but a simple executor.

I think you made very good points, and please don't understand this as a 
dismissal of your proposal -- it's very possible to find common ground 
between our multiple views. How can we have a good, solid Libre Graphics 
presence and still be open to ever-changing internal views, be them 
aesthetic or pragmatic? I'd risk an answer now, but i'd love to know 
your thoughts before.

Pardon my large essays, but i hate to feel that i missed some points i 
wanted to make.

:r

On 08/19/2010 02:09 PM, Yuval Levy wrote:
> On August 19, 2010 03:51:18 am Camille Bissuel wrote:
>> I'll be glad to provide visuals for the Create community, and from a
>> designer point of view, it's always a good idea to have some charter to
>> base on.
>
> exactly.  It's like a coding style guide for developers.  I don't remember any
> such charter presented here in the past five years.  It would be a major step
> forward, like a coding style guide is a major step forward for a software
> project:  it solves a significant chunk of potential bike-sheds.
>
>
>> But I don't what to bridle anyone creativity (on the magazine for example)
>> just because I'm the first one to provide something... furthermore LG
>> Magazine #0 was here first, and I didn't base my designs on it.
>
> Your intentions are noble.  Fact is that if we are to evolve to the next
> level, we must stop fiddling at this level. There is a trade-off to be played.
> Creativity has to be directed to areas that have not been exploited yet.
>
>
>> So, it really have to be a consensus, especially from the concerned
>> designers.
>
> Actually more a consensus of the "customers", i.e. the projects represented in
> LG or the LG Board.  Without the weight of some governance, the consensus will
> not last beyond a single edition, while ideally it should last for a few.
>
> Without governance every new designer that joins the fray could see this as a
> free game and reinvent the wheel from scratch.
>
> The weight of governance makes the difference between a mature project (that
> IMHO LG should strive to be) and a greenfield startup (the impression I have
> when looking at it from an external perspective).
>
>
> On August 19, 2010 07:06:28 am ginger coons wrote:
>> I would suggest that the magazine, being a slightly different beast from
>> the site, the logo, the conference, might in fact have a different
>> aesthetic. Because we're not talking here about a mouthpiece for the Libre
>> Graphics movement, a brochure, we're talking about a magazine with the
>> space to grow and change and in fact, build up a community that doesn't
>> really exist yet: a strong Libre Graphics user community. I think that
>> could be quite a different thing from the official face.
>
> Mostly agree.  Growth and change are not necessarily synonymous and you want
> to mix them wisely.  Sometimes growth is change, but sometimes it is the
> maturity of consistency.  You print professionals know it better than the rest
> of us:  make a good template, use it for a few editions (e.g. a cycle of say
> four regular editions and one or two special editions) and revisit when the
> content starts breaking the barrier of the media, not the other way around.
>
> Yuv
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> CREATE mailing list
> CREATE at lists.freedesktop.org
> http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/create