Should we contact ura design? (design for your Open Source project)

Continuing the discussion from New Qubes Website! New Whonix Website?:

They are providing the following services.

  • Logo
  • Brand Identity
  • Templates Style guide
  • Documentation
  • Consultancy

Which services should we request?

What would be appropriate offers for compensation?


Previous discussion on Whonix logo… Partially outdated… I may not agree with my previous self anymore. Still contains useful notes that have not changed such as legal requirements.

I would say Logo and Template Style Guide.
Documentation (what do they mean by that ?)
Brand Identity (seems unnecessary)
Consultancy ( dont know about this one)

I don’t know how much you or we could pay.(we could discuss my share in mumble, next time)
It depends on the Quality and the amount of work. Maybe they can tell us once we know what we want from them.

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Good day,

Well, whether or not it would be a good idea to get a new logo now is obviously up for serious debate, though I feel that the current one is both simplistic and memorable enough to not necessitate a change for now.

Regarding brand identity, I’d say that is covered rather well at the moment. Outside influences would probably not be able to improve much here.

Regarding style guides, if they can offer something without JS that would obviously be great.

Personally, what I feel like they mean with documentation is propably some written guidelines for html, brand identity, etc. If that is the case, I don’t feel like it is currently that necessary.

Now, consultancy I think is interesting. If they could maybe take a look at the current designs and concepts of Whonix and the webpages surrounding it, that could help us gain a better understanding on what works and what doesn’t.

Have a nice day,

Ego

Some time overlap between my and Ego’s post. Anyhow. I made first contact with ura by mailing them to get more information on our open questions regarding them. Let’s see.

[Whonix-devel] hello from Whonix community
https://www.whonix.org/pipermail/whonix-devel/2016-June/000647.html

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Right, but if the whole Website gets a redesign the logo should get a revival in the new design too.[quote=“Ego, post:3, topic:2509”]
Now, consultancy I think is interesting. If they could maybe take a look at the current designs and concepts of Whonix and the webpages surrounding it, that could help us gain a better understanding on what works and what doesn’t.
[/quote]
Sounds sane, if its not too expensive.[quote=“Patrick, post:4, topic:2509”]
I made first contact with ura by mailing them to get more information on our open questions regarding them.
[/quote]
Great, lets see what they say

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i would go with templates style guide & documentation (if they meant to design it)

but one thing i hope it wont happen

well i hope they have alternative to JS , any other language (ruby,python,html…etc) because of noscript+TBB.

but in the end it all matters on how much they want on their work , and how is their work going to be (fantastic , good , accepted , sucks …)

Which services should we request?

All of them if possible (once we find out more about the rest). From what I see they offer something more than just a redesign - the opportunity to create a coherent an appealing image to non-techies and advise on outreach strategies to the said group.

What would be appropriate offers for compensation?

Up to you. Formally you “don’t have to” but to feel right about it you can arrange to pay a flat sum per task proportional to Whonix donations.

Logo:
They seem most suited for logo refinement. Keeping the visual elements but flipping them with some ill Berlin graff stilo would be dope, I mean, refining the elements so as to more clearly communicate (:

E.g., the spacing around the lock should match the spacing between letters.

Brand Identity:
Fuck “Brands”. However, the visual identity is very important. I was not able to locate any examples of this on their site.

Templates Style Guide:
This might be up their alley, though I was not able to locate any examples of this on their site, either.

Documentation:
Their site says “Support us on Pantreon”. I am not confident that they will do documentation to the desired level of precision.

Consultancy:
They are using Patreon, which uses CloudFlare Internet Identity Services to actively attack Tor users. I am not confident that they will make good designations in this regard.

Wordlife,
Spencer

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Good day,

To be fair, Whonix is currently collecting donations over Flatter and PayPal, especially the latter being rather limiting when it comes to traffic via Tor and rather open when it comes to collecting and sharing information about transactions. So, not considering their consultance on the fact that they use Patreon would be rather hypocritical in my opinion.

Have a nice day,

Ego

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Hey guys!

Elio here, Founder of ura. Terribly sorry for the delay, your email landed in my spam folder unfortunately. I just saw it.

Before addressing your concerns, I want to emphasize that we are just one and a half people behind ura (it’s me and a friend who helps out occassionally) so a good bunch of things you have pointed out are due to change and be improved. It’s not like I intentionally designed the way we work like that and it’s set in stone. I’d be happy to take your feedback into account and do necessary change if fit.

Also, don’t forget that I have no security background, but a graphic design one (although I try to advocate about privacy). I use Fedora 23, Thunderbird and ownCloud so no worries, I’m not that classic designer with a Mac (I hate Apple). Check out this article also: http://blog.jonasoberg.net/bootstrapping-freedom-and-openness/

As well it’s hard earning a living in a proprietary world with FLOSS, so I set up a Patreon page so people can support me supporting FLOSS projects without a budget for design. I didn’t know Patreon attacks Tor users as well, so I will see what alternative I have about that.

In any case, I’d be happy to show you more of our work, especially since I haven’t put up much on our website yet, so I’d be happy to discuss here.

A short intro about me:

I have been part of Mozilla since early 2013, and since then I created over 25 logos used within various Mozilla projects [1]. I’m also responsible for the Community Design initiative within Mozilla, which offers contributors tools and pathways to get involved with Design at Mozilla, while working in tandem closely with the Mozilla Creative Team.

Furthermore, I have been Board Member of Open Labs Hackerspace [2] in Tirana, Albania since early 2013 as well. I’ve organized, facilitated and designed materials for events in this period of time for various Free Software & Open Source projects. I’m also co-organizer of OSCAL (Open Source Conference Albania) [3], one of the largest FLOSS conferences in the region. We are organizing the third edition in May.

There are several other FLOSS projects I’m involved in as a designer, such as Fedora (currently an Ambassador), Glucosio, GalliumOS, openSUSE and others. I’m also a mentor this year for FOSSASIA at Google Summer of Code.

Furthermore I am also an Author and Community Manager for SitePoint [4].


Enough about me, looking forward to talk to you!

[1] http://elioqoshi.me/en/mozilla-logos/
[2] https://openlabs.cc/
[3] http://oscal.openlabs.cc/
[4] Elio Qoshi, Author at SitePoint

Do your services include consulting…? Specifically a new Whonix home page is being developed at this moment by @Ego.

That draft will be switched from a dark to a bright design. The goal is to have a homepage with a much higher usability. Much clearer explanation of what Whonix is. More modern style. With a much lower bounce rate hopefully. Once it has been moved to the bright design… Would you be up to comment on the usability aspects?

Hey Patrick,

Yeah, I do consulting as well. If you can implement the changes according to gathered feedback we can do that. Another alternative would be that I could send you a landing page design of the new draft on how I would envision it.

Let me know if you want to discuss details.

btw, your logo could benefit of being simplified. This would make it much more approachable and appropriate for small screens (like smartphones). What would you think?

About the website consultation, we get back to that once it was switched to a bright design.

About the logo, simplification is one thing, another thing would be to create a new logo from scratch. And yet another thing would be to change the project name as well as the logo. Ideally to something more descriptive. I don’t like the name “Whonix” too much. If you mention “Whonix” to someone not knowing what that is, they understand “unix”. Terrible. A name that would be best understood in most languages would be best.

I agree. Would you consider rebranding as well? If yes we can do that too, just tell me to what extent you’d like to go

There should be no limits. Just for something as big as changing the
project name would have very encouraging motivation to outweigh the work
generated by it.

What do you think about Safe OS? It’s very approachable by people outside the community, as the title explains already what it’s about. It’s SEO friendly and simple.

Here is a quick proposal, what do you think?

(Nice logo!)

IMO, SafeOS is a bit too generic and can be interpreted to mean “technically secure”. There are multiple OSes that make that claim.

The keywords that distinguish Whonix are:

  1. privacy
  2. freedom
  3. not sure what the right word is here… “protection from your own mistakes” (ie idiot-proof, though we probably shouldn’t say that :slight_smile: )

Also should avoid any negative connotations: dark, shadow, stealth, etc…

Thinking out-loud: how to combine brightness, transparency, freedom with privacy? privacy is usually associated with darkness, secretiveness…

Great comments!

How about Keyward? It looks very elegant in my opinion. Or Keybond

I also don’t think we should refrain from a name because it is too generic, look at CoreOS for example.