Respecting the Ubuntu Brand Guidelines

Motivation

The Ubuntu Washington LoCo has a duty to fairly represent the entire Ubuntu community to users in Washington state. This is most effectively accomplished by embracing Ubuntu's standards, which include a set of Ubuntu Brand Guidelines that specify the proper use of the Ubuntu logo.

In order to most clearly communicate our LoCo's role, we should adopt a logo that:

• is easily identifiable by the Washington state community as representative of the worldwide Ubuntu community
• is easily identifiable by the worldwide Ubuntu community as representative of the Washington state community

To this end, the logo should include both elements symbolic of Ubuntu and of Washington State — e.g. both the official Ubuntu logo and an extension that symbolizes Washington state. Canonical's brand guidelines include a specification for Ubuntu brand extensions that specifically accounts for this kind of modification of the Ubuntu logo.

The Ubuntu Washington LoCo should respect Ubuntu's standards by adopting a logo that follows the Ubuntu Brand Guidelines as much as is practical.

Proposal

Like the official Ubuntu logo, use a horizontal or stacked format depending on the situation:

Horizontal format

For consistency, preference should be given to the horizontal format whenever practical:

Source: ubuntu-us-wa_horiz.svg

Regarding the abbreviation of "Washington" to "WA": Using an abbreviation has the potential to be less understood in an international setting, but the practical difficulty in using a logo that is wide enough to include the full length of "Washington" outweighs this. Since "WA" is not a reserved country code, we shouldn't have problems using it in an international setting.

Following the specification in Canonical's guidelines, the logo includes an "exclusion zone" that is based off the size of the roundel, and the cap height of the extension text is set to the height of the "u" in "ubuntu":

Stacked format

When necessary, the stacked format can be used:

Source: ubuntu-us-wa_stacked.svg

At the time of writing there is no official guideline for brand extensions in the stacked format, but we can make a best attempt by again preserving an exclusion zone that is based off the size of the roundel:

Icon

The icon is a special use case in which

• the bounds of the image are perfectly square.
• there is no exclusion zone.
• the image may be rendered at variable resolutions as small as 16x16 pixels.

To accommodate this case, use the stacked format without an exclusion zone for as long as the text is legible. At resolutions where the text is illegible, use only the Circle of Friends roundel:

Source: ubuntu-us-wa_icon-small.svg, ubuntu-us-wa_icon-large.svg

Context

From 2004 to April 2010, the Ubuntu visual identity was defined by the Human theme, which is characterized by a brown and orange color scheme, the tagline "Linux for Human Beings," and the older logo incorporating the Ubuntu Title typeface:

In April 2010, Ubuntu was re-branded with a new theme, Light, which features an orange and aubergine color scheme and a new logo that makes use of the Ubuntu Font Family typeface:

At the time of writing, the logos indexed in the Ubuntu LoCo Team Directory are still dominated by derivatives of Ubuntu's pre-April 2010 visual identity:

While there is no official requirement that community logos match the new visual identity, there is an informal expectation that they will keep up with the change.