Open source branding

Given the multitude of opinions naturally embedded in an open source project, communicating and branding becomes a daunting challenge. MOC's creative lead shares some thoughts on tackling branding in an open source environment.

During the last year MOC has sponsored weekly hours for our creative lead, Rasmus Skjoldan, to do work on brand management for TYPO3.

Having just published a status report on the TYPO3 branding work on typo3.org, we're happy to see the energy put into the project materializes into useful guidelines for everyone communicating about TYPO3.

However, the underlying questions being addressed here are not only true to an open source project.

What do you do when management of your brand is spread out to a larger community?

Although technical at heart, MOC often needs to interface deeply with communications, branding and design. We hope and believe that these insights into branding and communication improves our full-scale solutions.

Quite naturally, it comes down to motivating before controlling the brand experience - and to simplifying what's inherently rather complex. Any kind of brand management needs to deal with a lot of chaos. So the stronger, simpler and more structured the guidelines can become, the greater chances of success. 

It's been a nice experience to start seeing copy written based on the brand personality we've developed. It's a small thing now that will hopefully grow stronger and stronger.