Use of visuals for Drupal events (Branding)

We encourage users to post events happening in the community to the community events group on https://www.drupal.org.
DYdave's picture

Hi guys,

We've been working on the organization of Drupal Global Training Days in our local community and I was wondering if we could potentially use the official logo for the event's promotion, post on groups and communication around the event.
The idea behind that would be to try to keep a consistent branding between the events and allow users to recognize/identify easier what each event posted on the Group's page would account for.

Additionally, we would like to potentially "brand" or visually differentiate other types of regular/monthly events:
- Workshops (not yet an official type of events, see: New type of drupal one-day camp: DrupalConTribute and Drupal Contribute Workshops: activities)
- Meetups
- Happy Hour

We would be designing a small, simple, clean/clear and explicit logo for each type in order to allow each event to really stand out of the Group's home page (teaser view), especially for new comers who are much less familiar than us with the regular types of activities and monthly events.

I'm not completely familiar with the possibilities that we would have with these visuals. Would we be able to design a few small logos or images (clean/simple/direct) for these events and use these visuals for these events posted on Groups?
Would there be any particular procedure (some sort of moderation with validation, approval, etc...) in the Drupal Community to get the approval of any of the visual elements we would be adding to the branding of these events (in our own local community)?

I would greatly appreciate if anyone would have any recommendations, suggestions or indications on the materials that could be used or not and the flexibility or rules that would be related with these.

Feel free to let me know if you would have any questions, comments or issues on any of these questions, I would surely be glad to provide more information or explain in more details.

Thanks very much for to all in advance for your answers, comments and feedback.

Comments

Just go for it

hexabinaer's picture

Seems like the members of the visual branding group are quite busy with other tasks. My recommendation: just carefully work with what you see and contribute your artwork. We're still kind of trying to find a simple way for pooling artwork files ...

I think we all agree that the main goal at the moment is recognizability.

Although, if you look at the great designs for DrupalCons, you can tell that there's no strict style guide yet ;-)

Keep it simple sounds great! What about legal aspects?

DYdave's picture

Hi hexabinaer,

Thanks a lot for your prompt and kind reply.

Sounds really good, yes, this is what we would be looking for.
We're not really asking for anyone's help (although we wouldn't disagree either :-)) to produce the designs for the logos and we would surely be glad to share them. I guess that's what we'll do in the design specialized groups.

For sure, we'll aim at keeping things very simple and as you mentioned focus on recognizability.
In particular for new comers, as I initially explained: we're getting more and more regular events organized in the groups and we'd like to allow users differentiate them at a glance.

Otherwise, would you see any issues with any of that related with legal aspects?
Could we use the Drupal Global Training Day logo? (any conditions with it?)

Any feedback, comments, further questions or concerns would certainly be highly appreciated.
Thanks to all in advance.

Feedback on other types of events. . . .

jpw1116's picture

Distinguishing among the event types you mentioned gets my vote, but is there potential to incorporate even more new types?

For example, a standardized G.d.o meetup logo is great, only our WNYDUG group is used to having both brick-'n'-mortar and virtual (Goog+ Hangout) meetups. Maybe an "ornament" to add to a standard meetup logo would help. You know, something like a webcam/headphone icon slapped onto a corner of it.

The same goes for camps. We are planning a miniCamp in April, which is smaller in scale and duration—more like an afternoon retreat at a ski resort. Again, being able to use a standard camp logo with an added "mini" badge to it would seem fine.

I don't mean to sidetrack the discussion, just to plan early for event types that don't conform to the standard ones. The idea of augmenting the accepted visual branding is something I'd be in favor of, if it's legit.

existing resources to be found?

marcrobinsone's picture

Interesting discussion. Do we know if the higher ups (the senior Drupal members and/or organizers) already use or have a these branding assets?

I know there were these things before, but I cannot find them anymore.

If we do create a branding template ... it will probably comply and be approved by the trademark standards set by Dries and the Drupal Association (I think).

Only lawyers are to be asked legal questions ;-)

hexabinaer's picture

As far as I understood the guidelines, you'd perfectly use the logo for what it's made for: community and Drupal-related non-profit activities (my personal short interpretation).

See:
* Drupal trademark and logo policy: http://drupal.com/trademark
* Community events banner collection: http://drupal.org/logo-special-events
* FAQ about the use of the Druplicon: http://drupal.org/node/15101
* Marketing resources: http://drupal.org/marketing-resources

The international IT trade fair CeBIT takes place in Germany next week - keep an eye on twitter accounts @di_ev and @cmsgarden to catch some impressions about how we present Drupal in a larger framework (most relevant open source cms at a common both) - find examples for what we've done last year with Drupal-only branding: http://www.drupal-initiative.de/marketing.

Thanks and Hope if some one

AhmadZain's picture

Thanks and Hope if some one can help us to create an ammazing Logo ideas for Egypt Drupal Community

Drupal Egypt Manager
Drupal Consultant

Thanks and Hope if some one

AhmadZain's picture

Thanks and Hope if some one can help us to create an amazing Logo ideas for Egypt Drupal Community

Drupal Egypt Manager
Drupal Consultant

Thanks and Hope if some one

AhmadZain's picture

Thanks and Hope if some one can help us to create an amazing Logo ideas for Egypt Drupal Community

Drupal Egypt Manager
Drupal Consultant

Re: Global training day

marcrobinsone's picture

Well David, my gut tells me that there are no specific branding materials for the Global Training day. If there were, it would be listed on http://drupal.org/learn-drupal

In other words - I think we're free to make our own template ... and then share them to the world. If they want to use it, it's fine as long as it looks decent (or super cool) and it doesn't violate the trademark agreement/s.

At least for our events here in the Philippines, we produce marketing assets per event through the help of volunteers.

Taiwan and Singapore does the same thing too :)

You might want to check this

DSquaredB's picture

You might want to check this out: http://drupal.org/node/1600942 to see the Global Training Days branding.

DSquaredB
Danita Bowman

Thanks to all! Let's proceed!

DYdave's picture

Hi guys,

Thank you so much for your great feedback.

Legal issues & Global Training Day Branding:

I'm really glad you cleared out our doubts: we'll go ahead and use the official Drupal Training Day logo, since we would really like to keep the branding as consistent as possible (and also, you'll understand the immediate practical aspect - @TODO: discuss translation aspects).
Just to finish on this particular piece of visual material and speaking in general, I think we would try to always stick with the rules described in short by @hexabinaer and that's what I've also read through the indicated guidelines:

community and Drupal-related non-profit

Thanks also to @DSquaredB for providing a link to Global Training Day Branding guidelines which seem to confirm our initial assumption.

Design aspects:

(now that legal issues are out of the way, let's proceed and maybe try to take this somewhere)
We're going to work on drafting out a couple more visual elements for the China, Shanghai Groups, Monthly Happy Hour [very simple/direct visual (@TODO: further investigate/refactor)], Monthly Meetup (@TODO: further investigate/refactor), and Workshops [I guess we'll have to draft this one out from scratch, (@TODO: discuss design aspects)].

This would most likely be broken down into different discussions in different groups with topics more focused on the particular design aspects (less on legal matters), and I would greatly appreciate if anyone could let me know if there would be any existing initiative or working group for working on events branding/design materials (I would assume The Marketing of Drupal, Design 4 Drupal, Drupal Event Organization, crossed with Local/Geographic communities, and there's probably more).

[off-topic: improvement of groups' layout]
We've been thinking of re-using a layout similar to the Downtown Los Angeles Drupal Group, because of its clear/simple organization: secondary menu sections, clear description with links, and quick links with small icons (once again, clear/clean/focused/simple visuals bringing users to substantial information). Ideally, we would be able to find an organization of blocks, links, and quick access to resources/information with a compromise based/inspired from very popular groups such as Code Review of Full Project Applications | Home or The Marketing of Drupal (where there's a lot of useful information to provide).
@DSquaredB: This seems to somehow be related with our discussion in Project Management about group's layout, resources organization and layout structure.

@marcrobinsone:
Thanks very much for clarifying and confirming the legal aspects related with branding and communication materials for the Drupal Global Training Day events.
The Philippines Group is such a great source of inspiration to us at so many levels. You guys have a very clean/clear group, with secondary sections/links, useful resources to get closer with the local community, very nice visuals with your local community logo or for all of your events, in particular, looking at the CampusTour, all the branding work around it, with flyers, logos, backgrounds on forms [see Feedback Form (DC Manila 2013)], etc...

Hopefully, with some time, collaborative work and involvement, we will manage improving our groups' visuals, branding, organization and try to exploit the best points from these examples.

@jpw1116:
I wouldn't necessarily speak of a standardized G.d.o meetup logo, but perhaps rather of a default G.d.o meetup logo, in the sense that if nothing is specified,

we're free to make our own template

(See @marcrobinsone's comment above).
If I understood correctly, if you would be ready to do a bit more work, then you could always change, customize, translate, etc... the visual materials to your taste (or create a new/different one), otherwise, simply use the default logo (which is what we're going to do for this Drupal Global Training Day event on March 15).
Concerning the design aspects of the logos, it sounds like a great, simple/clean and easy solution, but perhaps this could be discussed in another post, more focused on design and these particular visuals.
For camps, workshops, etc... we would surely be very interested to follow an initiative on that and we could perhaps open other discussions in the design groups.
But legally speaking, since it seems there wouldn't be any problem, we would be able to move forward and start working/discussing more specific aspects.

Thanks again very to everyone for the great feedback on this matter, it is certainly highly appreciated.
Feel free to let me know if you would have any more questions, comments, recommendations, suggestions or concerns on any items discussed in this post, I would be glad to provide more information or explain in more details.

Any further feedback, comments, suggestions or ideas would surely be greatly appreciated.
We certainly look forward to digging deeper into the specific design elements described above.
Thanks in advance for your replies and comments.
Cheers!

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