[Tikiwiki-users] branding.tikiwiki.org -> Let's get this in gear before we release Tiki5! (project name, logo, new default theme family)

[Marc L. <ma...@ma...>]

Hi!

We now have a basic branding proposal at: branding.tikiwiki.org

1- Slightly modified project name
2- New logo
3- A new branding
4- A flexible/evolving format/approach (living branding strategy in a wiki)
5- A new default theme family (fivealive.css)
6- And a big surprise (to be announced along with 5.0)


Some background info:
---------------------------------

The goal of updating/improving Tiki branding/marketing has been
kicking around for a long time now.

We could once say/think that themes or the UI were our biggest
weakness. We worked hard on this, and now,
Branding/Marketing/Promotion is clearly the __only thing__ holding us
back from exponential growth. In fact, it's indirectly responsible for
many of our low scores:
http://tikiwiki.org/SWOT

It's not that people don't want to collaborate. Nature abhors a
vacuum. The lack of a branding guide and promotional material has been
painful. With no clear branding guide, everyone that was organizing an
event, printing some t-shirts, etc. did the best they could with the
(lack of) resources at hand. This leads to inconsistent branding. Ex.:
With several different logos in circulation, which one is the official
one? what is our look? Most will agree that the situation was a
challenge. But of course, this is one of those problems that are much
easier to identify than to solve.

Over a year ago, we had one of our biggest TikiFest ever with a focus
on "Branding+Marketing, Design and Look & Feel"
http://tikiwiki.org/TikiFestMontrealNov2008  This unleashed tons of
ideas & feedback: http://gallery.me.com/regis.b#100024 and everybody
got an eye opener on how diverse our project is. Tiki5 will have a
basic shopping cart and a CRM profile, in addition to
Wiki/CMS/Groupware!  It's very tricky to do marketing around something
as vast & diverse as Tiki and that "does almost everything". What is
our USP? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unique_selling_proposition
Branding/Marketing is often tricky because it goes to the soul of an
organization. It forces us to ask ourselves "who are we?", "what do we
want?" "where are we headed?", "Who are we trying to attract?". I
think it's implicit for many of us, but perhaps making it explicit
will help (at least for the next few hundred new people that will join
the project :-)

There is also the proverbial
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_by_committee risk. Our traditional
way of dealing with diversity of points of view is "make it optional",
"let the end-user choose" and "make a profile". While we have proven
it works for features, it's not so obvious for branding. It's easier
to agree on a feature than on a logo. I can always just avoid using a
feature I dislike or find useless. But the community branding will be
there for me too, even if I don't like it. Divergence of points of
view can lead to friction...  This being said, the logo/branding was
thought out as open-ended to make it easy to adapt to various
situations, and to translate.

On one hand, branding.tikiwiki.org is a proposal which conveys a
general direction. On the other hand, there is still quite a bit of
flexibility and work to do. We don't want a static PDF file. We want a
living document. As a bonus, we can dogfood the use case of using a
wiki for a branding guide :-)

Feature & bug wise, Tiki5 is pretty much ready to ship. However, I
want to release with the new branding. So let's take 2 more weeks to
converge on this and to make fivealive.css very stable. There are also
several other new (or old themes that have been re-introduced and will
be easier to maintain with the new theme architecture) themes which
need to stabilize. Several *.tikiwiki.org sites are already using the
new fivealive.css theme.  The header is shaping up and there still
needs quite a bit of work on the middle and footer.

Building on this, our communication team
(http://tikiwiki.org/Communications+Team) can develop a proper
marketing & promotion strategy. We need to prioritize some of the:
http://tikiwiki.org/User+Type and make sure we have a strategy for
each. This will take several month to become a "complete-enough"
resource. Please help make this happen :-)

Special thanks to Simon Lussier, Sébastien Lord-Jetté and Gary
Cunningham-Lee for their dedication and making the recent
branding.tikiwiki.org and fivealive.css a reality.   Special thanks to
Matthew & Pauline Bickerton who had kicked started the project and the
vast brainstorming at the Branding+Marketing TikiFest.


We all know Tiki has an amazing feature set.
We have a great model http://tikiwiki.org/Model
We all know we have a great community.

Now, how can we tell the World and multiply the collaboration?

Best regards,


-- 
Marc Laporte

http://MarcLaporte.com
http://TikiWiki.org/MarcLaporte
http://AvanTech.net
http://OurWiki.net