When I was working on posters and the white paper for Gridcoin, I had to do a lot of jumping around for direction on branding. We've got Josh's posts on Steemit. We've got Matt's work on Github. To save designers and other folks headaches in the future, I recommend (and am starting on) a Gridcoin Style Guide.
What is a Style Guide
A Style Guide is a document that has all of an organization's branding in one place. It has information on fonts, proper logo usage, color palette, mission statement, etc. It's an incredibly useful tool, it's something I looked for in the beginning and I wish existed when I couldn't find one.
Gridcoin's Guide
Doing a guide for Gridcoin is going to be challenging. Style guides are sometimes called Brand Bibles, they have all the rules and thou shall not break them. I do not think a strict guide fits with us. We're a decentralized community, there's no central authority that can or really should play logo police. I believe this guide should be seen and used as a general guide. I believe the only time this guide should be "enforced" is if someone asks for compensation from the Foundation.
I've got a rough outline of what I think should go into the guide and have started working on the intro and updating the color scheme. I really like Matt's color palette and I'm using that as a starting point. Some of the colors are out of the CMYK gamut, which means the color on the screen cannot be reproduced in print because you cannot create the color by combining cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. I need to take a look at the logo as well, I think some of the purples are out of gamut.
If anyone has ideas, thoughts, concerns, or designs; please chime in! If appropriate, I'd like to do the same thing we did with the whitepaper and have a poll when this complete to make the guide official. I've got some examples below. If I've missed anything please forgive me, it's early in the morning and I need more coffee.
Introduction
When I was working on posters and the white paper for Gridcoin, I had to do a lot of jumping around for direction on branding. We've got Josh's posts on Steemit. We've got Matt's work on Github. To save designers and other folks headaches in the future, I recommend (and am starting on) a Gridcoin Style Guide.
What is a Style Guide
A Style Guide is a document that has all of an organization's branding in one place. It has information on fonts, proper logo usage, color palette, mission statement, etc. It's an incredibly useful tool, it's something I looked for in the beginning and I wish existed when I couldn't find one.
Gridcoin's Guide
Doing a guide for Gridcoin is going to be challenging. Style guides are sometimes called Brand Bibles, they have all the rules and thou shall not break them. I do not think a strict guide fits with us. We're a decentralized community, there's no central authority that can or really should play logo police. I believe this guide should be seen and used as a general guide. I believe the only time this guide should be "enforced" is if someone asks for compensation from the Foundation.
I've got a rough outline of what I think should go into the guide and have started working on the intro and updating the color scheme. I really like Matt's color palette and I'm using that as a starting point. Some of the colors are out of the CMYK gamut, which means the color on the screen cannot be reproduced in print because you cannot create the color by combining cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. I need to take a look at the logo as well, I think some of the purples are out of gamut.
If anyone has ideas, thoughts, concerns, or designs; please chime in! If appropriate, I'd like to do the same thing we did with the whitepaper and have a poll when this complete to make the guide official. I've got some examples below. If I've missed anything please forgive me, it's early in the morning and I need more coffee.
Examples
United Way http://www.uwcm.org/main/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/UW-Brand-Guidelines_v1.0-preliminary01.13.17.pdf Ethereum https://www.ethereum.org/images/logos/Ethereum_Visual_Identity_1.0.0.pdf Medium https://www.behance.net/gallery/7226653/Medium-Brand-Development I Love New York https://issuu.com/lukaszkulakowski/docs/8278452-i-love-new-york-brand-guide George Mason University - Go to Page 27 https://brand.gmu.edu/wp-content/uploads/assets/guides/MasonBrandProfile_2014.pdf