[Advocacy] Re: Branding, logos and badges (was iAudio says 'Ogg' not 'Vorbis')

[Monty]

On Sat, Nov 12, 2005 at 12:25:45AM +1300, Aaron Whitehouse wrote:
> As an aside, Monty, I would have quite liked to have received your
> response as the person who had initially brought the issue up; I was
> left wondering where the roadblock was found.

I apologize; much of the roadblock is me (I'm not a great exec and I
have only part of one day every week to keep up with *everything* I
have to do for Xiph). I need to keep up with getting things to and
from Melissa.  As for the email, I'd been ignoring the thread mostly
because this is a subject that brings out the worst in me.

> I think the first step is to decide whether we (the Xiph 'stakeholders')
> want a set of badges representing the level of Xiph codec support, or
> whether we are content to have a generic logo to just say that the
> device implements something. Perhaps the first approach is preferable
> (with continuity through the designs) to provide badges that are good to
> a minimum size of 20x20mm (for example - these could be used on the
> boxes of players, manufacturer's websites etc.) and the latter for those
> situations as posited by Daniel; 4mmx4mm monochrome. It would be very
> nice to offer a suite of graphics to manufacturers etc. (on the
> satisfaction of some quality controls). These are the issues which I was
> hoping to determine with my previous email.

We intend to have two things for each codec: 

a color logo that scales well; 4mmx4mm is probably too small, but it
should translate well to near that.  the logo would include a color
wordmark.

A black and white wordmark that may appear without the diamond logo
for monochrome applications.

> they are often receptive to do work for free, or at a
> discounted price, in exchange for high quality advertising.

That is the current situation.  Melissa Breglio offered to do the work
at a steep discount (she's done other work for free, but this was a
bigger deal).  At about the 80% completion mark, Apple unexpectedly
made her a really good offer to drop everything and move cross country
to work for them.  She's now hosed into the ground with work they've
given her.  She's still finishing the Xiph work, but she now has much
less time to concentrate on it.

> I think that some would go for it (the site is quite high-traffic). I
> personally consider this important enough to apply the (very scarce)
> funds of the foundation, but acknowledge that, even if they were
> available, others would likely disagree.

We have already done that.  The funds are spent.  I do not want to
spend them again unless it's clear the effort is wasted and Melissa
has disappeared (which she hasn't).

> Step 3 would be to Trademark the new designs. If the designs are
> trademarked then they allow the Xiph foundation to more effectively use
> the badges/logos for quality control.

Hmmm.... maybe.  The free service mark does cover most of what we care
about though.  It's not clear what we'd need a registered mark for
(unless some foulup happened with domains or something).  Feel free to
comment on this aspect.

> Step 4 would be to make the designs available (through the website) and
> to be very clear of the conditions which need to be satisfied in order
> to use them.

Yes.

> Step 5 would be to contact existing users of Xiph codecs and alert them
> to the new logos and request that they move to the new designs.

Yes.  This is all exactly inline with our thinking.

Monty