[ocaml-biz] basics of Branding

[William D. Neumann]

On Fri, 27 Aug 2004, Brandon J. Van Every wrote:

> When you develop the OCaml clothing line, you let us know.  :-)

Heh.  Gimmee a logo first...

> People also would put an "OCaml Powered" logo on websites.

That's more along the lines of what I was thinking for OCaml -- much like 
the Programming Republic of Perl or Powered by Perl logos available here 
<http://perl.oreilly.com/usage/>.

> Why do you suppose they rendered in the style of engravers or Old 
> Masters rather than Monet, Van Gogh, Dali, etc?  Lotsa visual styles 
> could have been eye catching, but they made this technical, meticulous 
> choice.

That was covered in the link I posted the other day.  According to the 
artist who designed the very first O'Reilly animal cover

<<When I was first approached by O'Reilly to propose new covers for 
their books, I was immersed in the VAX/VMS world of Digital Equipment 
Corporation. I had heard of UNIX, but I had a very hazy idea of what it 
was. I had never met a UNIX programmer or tried to edit a document using 
vi. All of the terms associated with vi, sed and awk, uucp, lex, yacc, 
curses, to name just a few, sounded to me like words that might come out 
of a popular game called "Dungeons and Dragons." I developed a mental 
picture of the UNIX programmer as a "Dungeons and Dragons" player. As I 
started to look for imagery for the book covers, I came across some 
wonderful wood engravings from the 19th century. The strange animals I 
found seemed to be a perfect match for all those strange-sounding UNIX 
terms, and were esoteric enough to appeal to what I believed the UNIX 
programmer type to be.

When I presented the first animal covers to the people at O'Reilly, they 
were a bit taken aback.

"But they're so ugly!" said one.

"No one will want to pick these up!" said another.

"They're scary!"

Tim liked the quirkiness of the animals, and thought it would help to 
make the books stand out from other publishers' offerings. Today, the 
O'Reilly animal brand is well known all over the world.>>

Although your question leads me to wonder if using a logo in the style of 
Matisse, or some other well known French artist might not be a bad idea. 
OCaml is a French product, and programming in it is a bit like creating 
art...  I really think something along the lines of this 
<http://www.bluespoon.com/banjoh/poster/matisse.jpg> or this 
<http://74savoie.free.fr/ballades/notre_dame/images/matisse.jpg> or 
even this <http://www.tcd.ie/History_of_Art/assets/jpegs/Matisse.jpg> 
could work well.  (And mostly OT, I soooo love this Matisse parody 
<http://www.princetonol.com/groups/iad/lessons/high/images/parody-matisse.jpg>)

> Here, we seem to be a bunch of techies reinventing notions
> of 'Branding' on first principles.

Well, I think that rather than trying to reinvent those notions, I'm 
trying to state clearly what they are (to the best of my understanding) so 
that we don't artificially limit or expand our search-space of ideas.  I 
don't want people rejecting possibly good ideas because they don't say 
<insert adjective here>, and not to waste time by drawing half-naked 
female ninja space-pirates (BTW: I finally thought of a "sexy" logo the 
other day... the St. Pauli Girl logo -- not that that's worth anything 
here).

> We don't have infinite time to debate, make submissions, or revise
> either.  Debating brand identities is the easy part: we all know how to
> use words cheaply.  Once we start drawing and submitting, we're gonna
> find that "um, it's not quite good enough" gets real old real quick.

I see what you're saying, but I'm still of the "picture = 1000 * words" 
school of thought.  I am much better suited to looking at an image, saying 
yeah, I like parts a, c, and q, and then trying to use a,c, and q to 
evolve the image -- reading something like "I'm kind of pictureing an 
abstract grapefruit and a clown" mean next to nothing to me... is the 
clown eating the grapefruit? Sitting on it? Being squashed by it? and so 
on... I suppose the two processes can run in parallel, but one can only 
analyze something for so long before he has to actually produce 
something...

William D. Neumann

---

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