Brand definition

[mtrythall]

We should clearly define the brand in accordance to goals and user perception. This is much more than just collecting assets.

On http://building.gittip.com/brand/ we should be able to outline the intended feeling of the brand. What do we want the audience to walk away with when reading/interacting with Gittip? This can manifest itself in the way of adjectives, emotions, or brand stories (or all of the above).

[mtrythall]

To note, we can probably use the vision stuff:

We envision a future in which the economy is characterized by trust, collaboration, cooperation, sharing, openness, transparency, care for one another, inclusion, inspiration, purpose, generosity, patience, empathy, optimism, and love.

But we just need to agree to use it.

[thefoxis]

I think Mailchimp's Voice and Tone will be a great inspiration here. Not saying it should be as lenghty though.

[patcon]

I really like that voice and tone thing, btw. Heck, I feel like I could write some of their copy now :) I think that's comforting for someone looking for direction, as "say whatever you feel like" isn't always reassuring when writing copy. Or when trying to resolve disagreement on why some bit might work best rephrased. This stuff strikes me as pre-emptive conflict resolution for an open company :)

I found these branding guides for open source projects helpful to imagine how it might work for gittip:
http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/styleguide/communications/copy-tone/
http://design.canonical.com/brand/A.%20Brand_Communication_Guide_v1.pdf
https://drupal.org/node/338208#voice

[chadwhitacre]

Thanks for the additional links, @patcon. I like the idea of having something along these lines, but I'm leery of sounding Orwellian. In general, I loathe the corporate "we" (also, IRC and Hangout). These make me cringe:

• "MailChimp’s voice is first and foremost human."
• "Whenever a user — or anyone else, for that matter — reads a piece of Mozilla communication, they should feel like there's a person on the other end who recognizes that they are the same. They should feel like we care about them and how they spend their time online. That's not a gimmick or a piece of marketing, either. It's one of the principles Mozilla was founded on."

Drupal advises avoiding the first person in certain contexts. I think for Gittip we want to embrace the first person as much as we can. We want to minimize the times we have to speak as a monolithic brand, and instead communicate as much as we can in the first person. This is something I picked up from @bronwenc over on opencompany.org: the importance of a definitive, buck-stops-here Author in journalism (although, The Economist). We want to bring out individual voices on Gittip as well, as part of making it transparent who is doing what around here.

[chadwhitacre]

That said, could you all review http://building.gittip.com/brand/ and let me know what else we need there in order to close this ticket? :-)

[chadwhitacre]

Not just journalism, academia. Think of the list of names on a peer-reviewed paper: that's what we want on pieces published on building.gittip.com, and probably elsewhere under Gittip.

[chadwhitacre]

I mean, I take it that the point is that we want to document our brand guidelines, not that they should be exactly the same as this or that other company. :-)

[chadwhitacre]

We have brand guidelines up. Let's reticket specific improvements.