[Bf-marketing] Corporate Identity

[Pierre-Luc Auclair]

Well, as you probably know an identity is not just about color 
guidelines and good templates. In fact it's mostly a mid-term goal, it 
doesn't have to be decided until we know all we wanna do first.

Here's what I think lacks. Blender should really have a tagline, I have 
no idea what yet but something along the lines of Nike's "Just Do It" or 
HP's "Invent".

I also think that Blender should take a new approach. First, Blender 
should feel more people driven right at the time you . The homepage 
should encourage enterprises and individuals to get into "Blend In" to 
Blender ;-) . Right now there is the "Get Involved" link, we should have 
a section for Enterprises too.  I think studios (either movie, game, 
etc.) could really help, and that why I think they should have good 
support to get them started coding. On that point I believe we should 
maybe do a partnership with one or two enterprises but I don't wanna get 
into it right now.

The homepage could also have some kind of teasing stuff to get people 
interested. If people see cool stuff, they'll be more ported into 
working their asses off to learn instead of bitching the interface. The 
E-Shop could also use a bit of accentuation, simply having some kind of 
"Support Blender" link with an explanation of what needs to be paid to 
keep running would not hurt.

I don't want marketing to interfere with Blender's development, that 
must be the same for you. We should just sell ourselves the best we can 
to attract more devs to keep up with the pace of modern software.

I feel we should have a historic section to show people where Blender's 
coming from.

Also, as I said when talking about giving a more humane face, Contact 
should be split. Giving only one email link in the  
"foundation(at)blender(dot)org" isn't very serious.

Blender, I feel, is at a stage where it has either to show it can be as 
professional as any software out there or stay a "low-level" software in 
people's mind. If the software isn't up par for now for a few tasks, we 
should at least let them know it's being worked on and incite people to 
join that way too.

A few dev journals maitained by the marketing crew showing what's up 
behind the walls to keep people on the edge in the dead times between 
version. It also helps showing there's people behind Blender and that 
something is actually in the works (in here we all know there is, but 
average joe visiting Blender can't figure out.

I firmly think we should work on  the  sense of belonging to Blender, 
best may to spread Blender is word to mouth. If we could get some viral 
marketing going on, maybe series of fun little videos realized with 
Blender with the help of different "feature animators". Things of a few 
seconds, good humour.

What I say here is still in the early stage. It'll require a lot more 
thinking, and I'm sure we can find more original ways to get people 
interested and involved.

If someone could tell me what's been done it would be nice.

Ton, I'm sure you have things to say on that since it's your stuff.

Pierre-Luc
---


Ewout Fernhout wrote:

>Pierre-Luc,
>Don't go too wild on the it! Although it never hurts to read in on the
>subject :o)
>
>Blender already has a world class identity, it just lacks the
>guidelines and conformity. Our task is (IMO) to sort out which colors
>to use (this will be cutting down on the colors currently in use), and
>to make sure there are good templates. We won't re-do the whole
>Blender identity.
>
>Ewout
>
>p.s. I still haven't recieved any mail from you personally, don't
>hesitate to send questions or anything else.
>
>On 1/2/06, Pierre-Luc Auclair <p.lucauclair at heliosmulti.com> wrote:
>  
>