NLnet Gives KOffice a New Logo and Sponsors ODF development

The Dutch NLnet foundation aims to financially support organisations and people that contribute to an open information society. Some time ago they decided to help KOffice in two exciting ways: to sponsor the design of a new logo for KOffice, with matching logo designs for all KOffice applications, and to sponsor Girish Ramakrishnan to improve the ODF support in KWord 2.0. The KOffice team is deeply grateful to NLnet for this support!

Girish Ramakrishnan, a former Trolltech employee, has already started on implementing a thorough test suite for ODF text loading. Helping him are Thomas Zander and Thorsten Zachmann, two old-time members of the KOffice team. In his own words:

"I am working on getting ODF support up to speed in KWord, my work being sponsored by NLNet. As the first step, I
have spent my time now automating the ODF testsuite at the OpenDocument Fellowship....

"So far, I have found some basic tests are failing - loading of lists, possibly superfluous spaces/blocks. I have patches coming up."

KOffice has done without a real logo forever: we used to use the application icon of KOShell, a rainbow, but that was hardly a real logo, and besides, everybody, including the primary school your correspondent attended, uses a rainbow. But coming up with a good logo is hard, and we postponed and postponed the task.

But then NLnet proposed to retain the services of designer Michiel van Kleef of 30 Media. Michiel was faced with a very hard brief: to design a logo, not an icon, for KOffice which combines business and creativity in one, integrated package. After consultation with the KOffice team we arrived at the following logo:

This great design suggested to Michiel the possibility of doing variations on it for the individual applications that KOffice consists of. While KOffice itself has got the KDE color blue, the business applications get orange:

  

  

  

And the graphical applications get purple (and it's good to see that Karbon2 opens the official SVG sources correctly):

  
  

KPlato, the project planner application that is coming along amazingly well for KOffice 2.0 is the odd one out, and gets red:

The helper applications KChart and KFormula are green:

  

There is also a logo for Kugar, the report writing component in KOffice 1, which will probably be replaced by Adam Pigg's promising new report component in KOffice 2:

All with a subtle, but apposite variations on the design in the circle.

Now all that remains to be done is updating the KOffice website and prepare some t-shirts for Akademy!

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Comments

by Dimitri (not verified)

This was a bad choice. In MS Office you have your Icons and every one sees "Ah this is Word or this is outlook". They are clear and easy to remember. No problem.

But here? The may be nice, crystal,svg etc etc but there is absolutely no association between the icon and the application - and that is what icons are for.

Dim

by Darryl Wheatley (not verified)

Those are logos. The icons may be different, depending on what the oxygen team decides.

by Dimitri (not verified)

Ok, but why do we (koffice) need three different icons for one application?
Just imaging mercedes would have a firm logo (the star), then there would be a logo for mercedes dealers and then every car gets his own logo (so one for the C-Class, the E-class and another one for the S-class). Sounds a little crazy doesn't it?

Dim

by g. (not verified)

"Ok, but why do we (koffice) need three different icons for one application?"

Read carefully if you can. There's only one icon per app.

The logos/icons (I don't know the real difference between the two words, honestly) are nice. The idea of assigning them a common "theme"/"skinning"/"branding" is brilliant. To repeat the '>' or '>' or '^' or 'v' symbol in each of them emphasizes that idea even more.

So, I can probably very easily recognize these logos/icons as "something to do with KOffice".

However, the total set still doesn't "work". Not for me, I'm sorry. It will take years for me to learn to differentiate between most of them. (Kexi I can associate with the "x", KWord with the "W"... but the rest I just don't "get").

I assume it would be very difficult to reject this "donation", even if some/most members of the KOffice Team felt the same.

Has there ever been such a thing like "usability testing" for a set of related icons/logos? If so, I'd be very much interested if testing this set would confirm my personal feelings. However, I don't assume there is any likelyhood such a testing will happen...

Oh, well. More important is, that code-wise the progress on KOffice is looking very good and promising.

Congratulations to the small developer team that brings this about. You can be proud to have come so far already. Hopefully, this achievement and the upcoming releases on Windows platforms will also bring you more and new developers joining in over the next two years.

by Thomas Zander (not verified)

> I assume it would be very difficult to reject this "donation", even if
> some/most members of the KOffice Team felt the same.

They don't feel the same.

by Cultural Sublimation (not verified)

Where can I find the SVGs for these wonderful icons? I would very much like to learn from such masters...

by Valerie (not verified)

Nice! But... am I the only one who thinks that the Kexi logo looks like an angry smiley face? A bit like >:( ? It's pretty funny, but I doubt that it is the intent...

by Ruben S. (not verified)

These new logos are fantastic, they're very slick and professional! Seeing KDE4 come to life and the gorgeous new revised version of the blue gear logo for KDE, it seems fitting that the office suite also is getting a makeover.

Currently I'm forced to use Gnumeric for university, but I use KWord, Krita and Karbon14 more now than ever. It's good to see some thought being put into their promotion again. I know it's shallow to choose computer software based on their advertising and how stylish their logos are, but enough people still do. This is a much needed step in the right direction.

by emonk (not verified)

Nice... but I think they are very similar to each other, and users will not run programs that wanted to run.
Thanks and keep working!!

Text translated from spanish to english by google translate :P .

by emonk (not verified)

Nice... but I think they are very similar to each other, and users will not run programs that wanted to run.
Thanks and keep working!!

Text translated from spanish to english by google translate :P .