A new logo separates the foundation from its flagship software — and arrives as the open source office status quo is being turned on its head.
Until now, The Document Foundation has been getting by using the logo of the software project most closely identified with it. Now it has its own.
“This was a deliberate choice: a young project needed to concentrate recognition on a single name and a single mark, and LibreOffice was the name people needed to know,” Italo Vignoli, a TDF co-founder, wrote on the foundation’s website on Friday.
As hard as it is to believe, almost a generation has passed since we first heard of The Document Foundation, and during that time the foundation and LibreOffice have shared the same logo.
A 16-Year Open Source Odyssey
In a way, they’re identical twins. At the start, TDF was largely composed of developers who were going AWOL from OpenOffice.org, the StarOffice-based office suite that had been started by Sun Microsystems, but which fell under Oracle’s ownership when Ellison and company purchased Sun as a sinking ship. From the start, Oracle all but abandoned OpenOffice, and TDF was basically formed to fork the software and release it as LibreOffice.
I was a LibreOffice cheerleader when it was first released, and although I missed the boat entirely about what the fork would mean to OpenOffice, LibreOffice has not only met, but exceeded my expectations.
Immediately upon its release, and continuing through today, LibreOffice became the open source office suite that matters. There have been other open source office suites launched since then, but so far none have captured the hearts and minds of everyday Linux users the way LibreOffice has. To this day, TDF remains the legal entity that stewards LibreOffice, not only by seeing to its development, but by nurturing a commercial community that has grown up around the project, which offers support, hosting, and the like.
From the beginning until now, it’s pretty much been impossible to think of The Document Foundation without automatically thinking of LibreOffice and vice-versa.
“Sixteen years later, the foundation’s work extends well beyond the product,” Vignoli said. “TDF takes part in the development of the Open Document Format (ODF) standard, contributes to policy discussions on interoperability and digital sovereignty, and works with public administrations, standards bodies and other open source organisations. In these contexts, the foundation speaks as an institution, not as a software project, and it needs a signature of its own.”
TDF’s New Logo
The organization worked with Berlin-based URA Design to create a unique visual design for The Document Foundation that consists not only of a logo, but also a color palette and typeface to generate a visual TDF branding. The logo is a stylized page, not completely unlike LibreOffice’s logo, that references the documents that are at the center of the foundation’s mission.
According to Vignoli, the new look and feel affects only the foundation, and not the product that has always been closely identified with it.
“Nothing changes for LibreOffice,” he said. “Its name, logo, and visual identity remain exactly as they are. The two identities have different roles: LibreOffice identifies the software, while The Document Foundation identifies the organization that hosts LibreOffice and its community, and represents them in the wider world.”
Facing Changing Times
As much as this is being painted as a business-as-usual decision, it should be noted that it comes at a time when the open source office software arena is in something of a turmoil after years of relative quiet.
There’s recently been something of an acrimonious split with Collabora, after the two projects worked together for years with something that looked like a partnership. In addition, a consortium of EU-based organizations recently forked the open-core office suite OnlyOffice to release Euro-Office. Mainly because it does a better job than the other two at reproducing documents saved in Microsoft’s OOXML format, it’s being pushed as part of the EU’s push for digital sovereignty.
In other words, this may be an attempt by TDF to no longer tie its fortunes completely to LibreOffice, even though that comes from my brain and not from Vignoli or The Document Foundation.
The zipped logo package is available for download on The Document Foundation’s website. It includes both vector and raster versions of the logo, a favicon, and avatars for social media. There’s also a Visual Identity Style Guide that explains which version of the logo to use according to context, as well as explanations of the color palette, the typography, and the rules for their use. Use of the logo is governed by TDF’s trademark policy.
“Over the coming months, the new identity will replace the LibreOffice logo on the foundation’s website, social media accounts, and institutional documents,” Vignoli said. “Templates for LibreOffice Writer and Impress will also follow.”
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
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