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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/?1==
Edit: lol it’s Thursday night. I should go to bed.
Edit ×2: comments enabled; reply publicly here and it’ll show on the post as well. 
Edit ×3: I’ve revised the post based on feedback
@Conan_Kudo@fosstodon.org@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.
@Conan_Kudo did you read the blog post?
@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.)
@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.
@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.
@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.
@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.
@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.
@Conan_Kudo @cassidy I think that's true for a lot of FOSS which wraps itself in the aesthetic of commercial products to project a sense of professionalism, even when the project is a mix of volunteers and staff. Some times people volunteer for FOSS as a kind of self-directed internship to build their resume, but others are hobbiests working on CI, test suites, merges and releases when they aren't getting paid to do so, which is a kind of madness because they aren't making a product. This is the tension when acting the part of a vendor in a vendor/customer relationship and having others act the part of demanding customers.
Linux gets around some of this because it's organized by a vendor consortium, so the majority of people are being paid to work on it as a multi-vendor collaboration but desktop Linux doesn't have the same kind of strong industry depending on it, while some vendors do sell desktops it's a very small niche market and isn't funding a majority of the infrastructure the same way enormous multi-nationals fund the Linux kernel, each contributes a little to support their vertical but no one has coordinating the whole in their job description. Maybe Valve are putting in the most effort aligned with their attempt to reduce the business risk of MS shitting the bed, and RedHat, Canonical fund some but neither is dependent on selling RHEL Workstation or Ubuntu desktop for survival, they aren't putting Apple sized resources into it.
@cassidy And the foot *is* quirky and weird. That's okay. Humans are supposed to be quirky and weird. If we're afraid to be "real" in that sense, then I don't know what we're doing to make GNOME endure as a community that produces a product that people might want to use.
@Conan_Kudo @cassidy I feel this confuses loss of community with a community conversation about a logo changing?