Planet GNOME

Update: Thanks for all of the feedback and discussion on Mastodon and Matrix! I’ve revised this post a bit with some more nuance and context based on feedback. I apologize if my writing style was divisive; I wrote the first draft of this post pretty hastily based on some frustrating conversations and wanted to get all my thoughts out into one place rather than retreading the same thoughts in multiple places—but I should have let it cook a bit longer and gotten feedback before firing away and logging off.

Hopefully this latest revision better refelects those thoughts and my desire to have real conversations about them while being a bit less controversial.

This past week volunteers working with the GNOME design and engagement teams debuted a brand new GNOME.org website—one that was met largely with one of two reactions:

1. It’s beautiful and modern, nice work! and

2. Where is the foot‽

You see, the site didn’t[^logo update] feature the GNOME logo at the top of the page—it just had the word GNOME, with the actual logo relegated to the footer. Admittedly, some folks reacted both ways (it’s pretty, but where’s the foot?). To me, it seems that the latter reaction was mostly the sentiment of a handful of long-time contributors who have understandably grown very cozy with the current GNOME logo:

[^logo update]: 2024-02-14: I wrote a quick merge request to use the logo on the website yesterday since I figured someone else would, anyway. I wanted to demonstrate what it would look like (and do it “right” if it was going to happen). That change has since been merged.

Why the foot?

The current GNOME logo is a four-toed foot that is sort of supposed to look like a letter G. According to legend (read: my conversations with designers and contributors who have been working with GNOME for more years than I have fingers and toes), it is basically a story of happenstance: an early wallpaper featured footprints in the sand, that was modified into an icon for the menu, that was turned into a sort of logo while being modified to look like the letter G, and then that version was flattened and cleaned up a bit and successfully trademarked by the GNOME Foundation.

Graphic shared by Michael Downey on Mastodon

So, why do people like it? My understanding (and please drop a comment if I’m wrong) is that it often boils down to one or more of:

1. It’s always been this way; as long as GNOME has had an official logo, it’s been a variation of the foot.

2. It’s a trademark so it’s not feasible to change it from a legal or financial perspective.

3. It has personality, and anything new would run the risk of being bland.

4. It has wide recognition at least within the open source enthusiast and developer space, so changing it would be detrimental to the brand equity.

What’s the problem?

I’m the first to admit that I don’t find the foot to be a particularly good logo. Over time, I’ve narrowed down my thoughts (and the feedback I’ve heard from others) into a few recurring reasons:

1. It doesn’t convey anything about the name or project which by itself may be fine—many logos don’t directly. But it feels odd to have such a bold logo choice that doesn’t directly related to the name “GNOME,” or to any specific aspect of the project.

2. It’s an awkward shape that doesn’t fit cleanly into a square or circle, especially at smaller sizes (e.g. for a social media avatar or favicon). It’s much taller than it is wide, and it’s lopsided weight-wise. This leads to frustrations from designers when trying to fit the logo into a square or circle space, leading to excessive amounts of whitespace and/or error-prone manual alignment compared to other elements.

3. It is actively off-putting and unappealing to at least some folks including much of the GNOME design team, newer contributors, people outside the open source bubble—and apparently potentially entire cultures (which has been raised multiple times over the past 20+ years). Anecdotally, almost everyone new I’ve introduced GNOME to has turned their nose up at the “weird foot,” whether it’s when showing the website or rocking a tee or sticker to support the project. It doesn’t exactly set a great first impression for a community and modern computing platform. And yes, there are a bunch of dumb memes out there about GNOME devs all being foot fetishists which—while I’m not one to shame what people are into—is not exactly the brand image you want for your global, inclusive open source project.

4. It raises the question of what the role of the design team is: if the design team cannot be allowed to effectively lead the design of the project, what are we even doing? I think this is why the topic feels so existential to me as a member of the design team. User experience design includes the moment someone first interacts with the brand of a product through them actually using it day-to-day—and right now, the design team’s hands are tied for the first half of that journey.

The imbalance and complexity make for non-ideal situations

So what can we do?

While there are some folks that would push for a complete rebrand of GNOME—name included, I feel like there’s a softer approach we could take to the issue. I would also point out that the vast majority of people using GNOME—those on Ubuntu, RHEL, Fedora, Endless OS, Debian, etc.—are not seeing the foot anywhere. They’re seeing their distro’s logo, and for many, are using using e.g. “Ubuntu” and may not even be aware they’re using GNOME.

Given all of the above, I propose that a path forward would be to:

1. Phase the foot out from any remaining user-facing spaces since it’s hard to work with in all of the contexts we need to use a logo, and it’s not particularly attractive to new users or welcoming to potential contributors—something we need to keep in mind as an aging open source project. This has been an unspoken natural phenomenon as members of the GNOME design team have soured a bit on trying to make designs look nice while accommodating the foot; as a result we have started to see less prominent usage of the foot e.g. on release notes, GNOME Circle, This Week in GNOME, the GNOME Handbook, the new website (before it was re-added), and in other spaces where the people doing the design work aren’t the most fond of it.

2. Commission a new brand logo to represent GNOME to the outside world; this would be the logo you’d expect to see at GNOME.org, on user-facing social media profiles, on event banners, on merch, etc. We’ve been mulling ideas over in the design team for literal years at this point, but it’s been difficult to pursue anything seriously without attracting very loud negative feedback from a handful of folks—perhaps if it is part of a longer-term plan explicitly including the above steps, it could be something we’d be able to pursue. And it could still be something quirky, cute, and whimsical! I personally don’t love the idea of something super generic as a logo—I think something that connects to “gnomes,” our history, and/or our modern illustration style would be great here. But importantly, it would need to be designed with the intent of its modern usage in mind, e.g. working well at small sizes, in social media avatars, etc.

3. Refresh the official GNOME brand guidelines by explicitly including our modern use of color, animation, illustrations, and recurring motifs (like the amazing wallpapers from Jakub!). This is something that has sort of started happening naturally, e.g. with the web team’s newer web designs and as the design team made the decision to move to Inter-based Adwaita Sans for the user interface—and this push continues to receive positive feedback from the community. But much of these efforts have not been reflected in the official project brand guidelines, causing an awkward disconnect between what we say the brand is and how it’s actually widely used and perceived.

4. Immortalize the foot as a mascot, something to be used in developer documentation, as an easter egg, and perhaps in contributor-facing spaces. It’s much easier to tell newcomers, “oh this is a goofy icon that used to be our logo—we love it, even if it’s kind of silly” without it having to represent the whole project from the outside. It remains a symbol for those “in the know” within the contributor community while avoiding it necessarily representing the entire GNOME brand.

5. Stretch goal: title-case Gnome as a brand name. We’ve long moved past GNOME being an acronym (GNU Network Object Model Environment?)—with a bit of a soft rebrand, I feel we could officially say that it’s spelled “Gnome,” especially if done so in an official logotype. As we know, much like the pronunciation of GNOME itself, folks will do what they want—and they’re free to!—but this would be more about how the brand name is used/styled in an official capacity. I don’t feel super strongly about this one, but it is awkward to have to explain why it’s called GNOME and all caps but not actually an acronym but it used to be—and why the logo is a foot—any time I tell someone what I contribute to. ;)

What do you think?

I genuinely think GNOME as a project and community is in a good place to move forward with modernizing our outward image a bit. Members of the design team like Jamie, kramo, Brage, Jakub, Tobias, Sam, and Allan and other contributors across the project like Alice, Sophie, and probably half a dozen more I am forgetting have been working hard at modernizing our UI and image when it comes to software—I think it’s time we caught up with the outward brand itself.

Hit me up on Mastodon or any of the links in the footer to tell me if you think I’m right, or if I’ve gotten this all terribly wrong. :)

• 2025-02-13: Edited to correct spelling and grammatical issues and include more graphics.
• 2025-02-14: Edited to mention more design contributors
• 2025-02-14: Heavily revised to add more context, arguments in favor of the foot, and improve language throughout