The response to the call for designers for the Drupal 8 logo has been outstanding! More than 20 designers or firms have expressed interest and we’re still going through portfolios and conducting interviews. That part of the process should be complete by early next week. As mentioned in the design brief, the Drupal 8 branding will be an important element of the marketing of Drupal 8 and the goal is to have it complete in time for DrupalCon Prague. Now it’s time to talk about the rest of the process from here, and the opportunities to provide your input on the design.    

First, there are several underlying elements the designer will need to use as a kind of roadmap for the design. These elements include:

  • Key Message(s): what does the design need to communicate? Examples might be: “Drupal 8 was built by a community of passionate people” or “Drupal 8 puts mobile first.”
     
  • Target Audiences: Who does the design need to communicate to?
     
  • Tone: Should the design be fun, or more serious? What feelings should the design evoke in people who see it?

We would love to get your input. In the comments here, please weigh in on any or all of these elements. After one week, we’ll review the comments with the designer as part of their discovery process.

In a week or two after that, the designer will have several visual concepts to show. At that point we will put the concepts up here for more comments. After the comment period, one of the concepts will move forward. As the project lead, Dries will make the decision on which concept is chosen. The designer will then take the visual concept and bring it to a finalized design. Dries will then have final sign off on the design.

Thanks for taking the time to comment and please look for more updates soon.

Comments

charlie charles’s picture

Go for "Drupal 8 was built by a community of passionate people"

because they are people who visit drupal.org most often

and use drupal for their daily projects.

 

Neither fun or serious 

Because Drupal not something that's fun but it's

a place you go to find answers to what your trying

to achieve with drupal or to seek help from other

 

I hope that helps :)

 

 

Jsaylor’s picture

Very helpful, thank you! 

charlie charles’s picture

This is a good artilce why big company computerworld.cm choose

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9236648/Choosing_an_open_source_C...

Drupal over Joomla, word press

"Drupal is designed and maintained by website developers who need to build technically sophisticated sites. "There's a different level of developers in this community. It's more technical in nature [than the Joomla and WordPress communities]," Buytaert says."

I hope that's helpful :)

jyee’s picture

I agree, the message should be about the community. To be fair, the code side of Drupal is just code.  It can do a lot of really great and powerful things, but so can other frameworks and CMSes (albeit with varying degrees of extra headaches, cursing and rage). The community is what makes Drupal distinctly different from any "competitive" system.

The community is where you can find someone to build your Drupal site, people eager to teach you to build it your self and mentors to encourage you to make pieces of your site replicable to share and make the world better.

Ludo.R’s picture

Though the community of passionate people certainly deserve it, I think the message should not be some kind of "Who created Drupal".
Instead it should tell "Drupal is exactly what you need / it has been built to meet all your needs in the future years".
Of course, these messages aren't meant to be printed along with the logo, they are just the general idea.

Before asking the logo target audience, it should be asked first Drupal 8's target audience. I can't answer this question myself because of my lack of knowledge of Drupal 8.

The tone shouldn't be fun nor serious, but it should inspire confidence and flexibility.

Anonymous’s picture

In Branding & Marketing Committee discussions last year joostburger referenced Simon Sinek's "How great leaders inspire action" TED talk where he talks about the "golden circle" with why on the outside, then how and what.

Worth a watch, would be good to see how it could be applied to Drupal 8 branding - i.e. why use symfony, why use drupal, why in-place editting, why give up weekends, etc.

Creative Faze Inc’s picture

Based on the elements listed, we would like to provide the following input:

1. Key Messages

We think the market is already familiar with Drupal's friendly support from an amazing community so we feel the Drupal 8 logo should capture something new like the notion of embracing open-source not just as a technology, but as a way of life.  We need to empower our existing community and capture new markets through continuously teaching and training all users.  In totality, we need to make everyone fall in love with all that Drupal 8 has to offer.

2. Target Audience

We think the design should communicate to the following people:

- The Existing Drupal Community
- CTOs
- Software developers
- Marketing and communication staff
- Young Blood or New Blood

3. Tone

The Drupal 8 logo should be distinct in nature yet be connected to the core essence of the brand that has been established.  It should evoke a sense of high performing CMS that promotes its flexibility, security and user experience.  In its entirety, the design should have an edge to it, be professional and timeless in nature.

As a company who has been connected to the Drupal community since Drupal 6, we personally feel that this is what the Drupal community is looking to achieve and evolve to.  We have a solid foundation and we need to continue to support and make things easier for our fellow Drupal members and at the same time, gain market adoption.  We feel the above will help us work towards achieving this.

Anonymous’s picture

"We think the market is already familiar with Drupal's friendly support from an amazing community" - have to disagree with this - of those who have heard of Drupal, many think it is "too complicated" (i.e. they haven't learned how to ask), and many think it's a product which works out-of-the-box as opposed to a toolkit for creating a custom CMS.