Artwork, Merchandising, Corporate Design

[Fabian Nowak]

Hey all,

for the Chemnitz Linux days, some Xfce users and developers are going to
present Xfce to the visitors, among Enrico, Christoph, and me.

We faced the problem of generating [5] / creating posters and of the
corporate design (not in the strict business context, but rather in the
context of colors, apperance and so on). As a result, we oriented on the
Xfce home page. Unfortunately, most of the graphics used on the homepage
are self-created and only available as non-scalable PNG graphics.
Licensing issues will be discussed at the end of this e-mail.

So during the creation of our poster [1], I recreated some of them, they
are included in the scalable vector graphics for further usage [2], such
as e.g. the download logo.

Next, we wanted presentations. Due to the missing OpenOffice install on
my laptop during traveling to a conference when I created the
presentation, I took plain LaTeX Beamer for the presentation [3]. As I
modified the style a lot, I came up with a custom Xfce Beamer class,
which is not necessarily perfect and still subject to change (Frank is
hoped to help out) [4].

There has also been a minor effort in creating Xfce-related artwork
packages [6]. However, as mentioned at several sites, the content is
old, and furthermore badly named, badly saved (rectangle selection still
on), and finally not complete.

I hence suggest to create an artwork respository used for
1) Corporate Design stuff: logos, colour specifications as URLs to the
Xfce wiki, 
2) Artwork: Big Xfce logos, Website graphics
3) Templates
  a) Presentations: Beamer template class, template main.tex, 
logo
  b) Posters: SVG format for Inkscape, Xfig and others with 
a corporate design style such as the one suggested by me and derived
from the website
4) Merchandising stuff: templates for buttons, stickers, t-shirts

This will allow any designer still lots of freedom, but provide on the
other hand all the materials already in use, and further enable the
designer to make his content available to other designers as well. I
also propose that this repository be used for any content created with
relevance to Xfce so that people can more easily create new
presentations and other stuff by deriving from others' work and also by
working together on presentations and posters.

Finally, there are licensing issues: In the Xfce artwork package, some
files are under proprietary licenses as Christoph pointed out; though,
these files are used in lots of logos, websites, and everywhere.
I publish my materials under the Creative Commons License, Share Alike.

Looking forward to your constructive comments or created repository,

Fabian


[1] http://fabiannowak.de/CLT/poster06.png
[2] http://fabiannowak.de/CLT/poster06.svg
[3] http://fabiannowak.de/CLT/beamer_presentation.pdf
[4] http://fabiannowak.de/CLT/Beamer.tar.bz2
[5] http://fabiannowak.de/CLT/poster_screenshot2.pdf 
[6] http://www.xfce.org/downloads/xfce_artwork.tar.bz2