[foundation-board] new Open Knowledge brand concepts

Fri Feb 14 09:00:38 UTC 2014

All,

I'd like to share with you the concept we are moving ahead with for the new
Open Knowledge brand.

This is still quite rough - the details of how it will look, actual logos,
actual colours, how we'll use it in websites and merchandise and so on are
all still to be developed. But the concept is there. This is still
confidential; we are sharing with the team and key community leaders but
until the designs are more worked through and we are ready to share more we
don't want to publicise this yet.

As well as the brand concept we've talked a lot about what we should call
ourselves. The word "Foundation" has often lead to confusion, and of course
"Open Knowledge Foundation" is a lot of syllables, encouraging
abbreviation, and we know that OKF and OKFN are both unclear to new folks
and not particularly exciting names. After much debate, we agree we should
tweak our name slightly, at least in terms of how we present ourselves
(legal names we will consider separately).  So when we move to the new
brand, we're also going to start calling ourselves simply "Open Knowledge".
I believe this takes forward the strong recognisable elements of our name
today, in a short and compelling form, and is a clear and distinct name
which will make sense to both our current network and new people coming
across us for the first time.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6u30TgpCsjjV2stT2xCYjE5Y1pXYk5lR3gxLUJybzF5dTVF/edit?usp=sharing

Personally I'm really delighted with the concept (note that we are likely
to change the phrase "empowers not enslaves"). It fits all the aspects of
our work, network and goals and looks like it's going to look great on
digital assets like the website, in sub brands (like local groups and
working groups and projects), on social media, and of course on T shirts.
 The concept is partly inspired by the open Data Index and Open Data
Census, and the logo we go ahead with may be generated from the actual
2013, first ever Open Data Index data.

I hope you agree :)   Feedback is of course most welcome.

Best regards,

Laura

-- 

*Dr Laura JamesCEO  | skype: laura.james  |  @LaurieJ
<https://twitter.com/LaurieJ>The Open Knowledge Foundation
<http://okfn.org/>Empowering through Open Knowledgehttp://okfn.org/
<http://okfn.org/>  |  @okfn <http://twitter.com/OKFN>  |  OKF on Facebook
<https://www.facebook.com/OKFNetwork>  |  Blog <http://blog.okfn.org/>  |
 Newsletter <http://okfn.org/about/newsletter>*
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.okfn.org/mailman/private/foundation-board/attachments/20140214/b340177b/attachment.html>