The Transitional Journey of openSUSE’s Logo Rebranding

The open-source world is in the midst of an exciting transformation as the openSUSE community prepares to phase in a new project logo.

While the competition, which has more than 5,000 votes, has yet to conclude, below is a bit of information to help people understand the reasoning for rebranding the project’s logo and information about the next steps for the openSUSE brand once the logos contest is complete.

The beloved Chameleon passionately known as Geeko was first introduced in 2005 when the project began and was slightly changed in 2007 when the type was modified for the brand.

The openSUSE Project adopted the SUSE logo from 2003, but was characterized by a different text beneath it, marking an era of brand association for the community lead project. SUSE has refreshed its brand over the years and its newest logo revealed in 2020 differs completely from that of openSUSE’s. However, the brands of both SUSE and openSUSE can oftentimes confuse people who don’t understand the relationship between the open-source company SUSE and the open-source community project openSUSE.

To help reduce this cross-branding confusion, the community seeks to create a unique brand identity, but to help provide a distinction between the company and the community project; hence, the chameleon inspired logo design contest. Differing logos is a first step to help people identify the difference between the two brands and should alleviate issues that have or could arise in community projects from oozing into the company’s brand identity.

The new logo aims to create a distinct identity for openSUSE, enabling a clearer separation from SUSE. The new logo is expected to be distinguishable from SUSE’s branding and is expected to share a similar style with the logos of its distributions.

The next steps after the logo competition concludes is to discuss the winning selection during the openSUSE Community meeting on Dec. 12 at 14:30 UTC. People are welcome to attend and discuss the results and how the project should move forward with the designs.

After the new logo is announced, the old Geeko logo will be used alongside the new one in stickers and other marketing material to bridge this transition to the new logo. Introducing the new logo alongside the old one will help users adapt to the new identity gradually.

Community members will likely see the logo on table clothes, clothing and other apparel during the transition period, which should make these items unique collectibles. Community members can help get information out about the new logo by attending open-source events and organize a booth at one of the several events.

People within the community who will have feedback about the newly selected logo can email the project’s artwork mailing list or discuss in on the project’s marketing Telegram group.

The person doing the branding changes and maintenance for the distributions has a say in any changes. The ultimate brand decision will rest with members of the project doing the implementation, but the results from this logo competition will provide an expressed opinion of the brand identity project wide.

Vote now at survey.opensuse.org.