OpenOffice.org branding

I'm so happy. OpenOffice.org is getting a brand makeover! Those seagulls mean so much to me, and will mean so much more in the new friendlier blue with added Oracle™:

The OpenOffice.org Logo and the seagulls are well recognized - even if not applied consistently today. Therefore it is more than reasonable to retain the text string, the color code blue/black and the seagulls. They express the openness, freedom and collaboration we experience. A new blue - friendly and modern – is used. The new tint reminds of a blue sky in a sunny day and with the seagulls also being blue and flying, the sensation of freedom and openness is reinforced.

http://www.openoffice.org/trademark/brandrefresh.html

It's obvious OpenOffice.org is in good friendly hands at Oracle. And I'm sure that means they'll now go about fixing bugs that tarnish the openness, freedom and collaboration inherent in the brand, not to mention stuff like supporting some long overdue interoperability (collaboration) features. Like preserving the data in Microsoft Word fields in .doc format and adding “Save as .docx”.

It's lovely to see that the logos will be available as SVG files. Pity that OpenOffice.org Draw doesn't have SVG as a native format – there is an export/import feature but last time I checked – trying to work on SVG documents from Peter Murray-Rust it didn't really work properly.

To celebrate the new look, I'm going to go and log the bug in the graphics handling in OpenOffice.org that meant that when my 9 year old drew a picture of a snowman in OpenOffice.org Writer for a brochure for his new travel enterprise “Frosty Holidays”, the line-art didn't print1. See, the default line width in an OOo picture is '0' and this causes lines to show OK on screen but render inconsistently for the web, PDF and print. I knew that all we had to do was to change the line width to something like 1mm because I ran into the same problem just the other day with the diagram we've been building in our work on metadata stores for data.

I wonder what's going to happen to the colours in the OpenOffice.org pallette – Sun1, Sun 2, Sun 3 and Sun 4 which give off a reassuring sense of solid persistence and longevity not to mention reminding us that the network is the computer. Maybe it's not any more. Are we supposed to say “The database is the computer” now? Will there be new Oracle colours too? Will the Sun colours be dropped or deprecated?

Copyright Peter Sefton, 2010. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Australia. <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/au/>

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