Clarify Brand Guidelines for .NET Foundation and Community Usages

[michael-hawker]

Hi!

Love that this repo is out on GitHub and provides a lot of great detail. However, most of the guidance in the brand guidelines PDF seems to be geared as if everything is coming from .NET communications (I assume from the .NET team itself).

It'd be great to have a section/guidance on how to use (or not use) this content with regards to the .NET Foundation or community projects which are .NET based.

E.g. if a project wants to proudly badge themselves as supporting .NET or that a specific feature they support is .NET Standard, how should they go about doing so? Can they just use the .NET Logo or not?

Thanks!

[BethMassi]

You can use the .NET logo to represent the .NET platform and the .NET ecosystem without modification. This repo is meant to also provide guidelines and resources for the community to use when representing .NET in your materials like presentations, swag, events, etc. This isn't branding guidelines for .NET Foundation but that is something the foundation's marketing committee has on its list to work on. If you are a .NET Foundation project, then you can use the .NET Foundation logo to indicate that your project is part of it. There is also a dotnet-foundation/swag repo that you can submit community artwork. Hope that helps.

[michael-hawker]

Thanks Beth,

Thanks for the clarification. I think your note about:

You can use the .NET logo to represent the .NET platform and the .NET ecosystem without modification.

Is just missing from the guidance that I was reading in the PDF, thus my confusion about how to show that a project supports it.

[BethMassi]

Got it. So how about I just clarify on page 15 Logo usage by updating the first sentence to "The .NET logo is a core brand asset to foster immediate recognition of the .NET platform and ecosystem."

[michael-hawker]

@BethMassi that's a good addition, but I think it's slide 13 that's the more confusing one because of the statement:

This logo should be used in instances of official .NET communications.

Should this be updated to be something more like:

This logo should be used to represent the .NET platform and the .NET ecosystem without modification.

Even then, I fell liked it's a bit unclear on the context of who the document is targeting (i.e. .NET team, .NET Foundation projects, community projects which are .NET based, or all of the above). I think the answer is the later based on our discussion, but there's not guidance in the doc to say things like:

• "if your community GitHub project targets .NET standard, you can use this logo"
• "if your project supports multiple languages, only use the .NET logo near content that's specifically for .NET"
• ".NET Foundation projects should also look at guidance here to decide which logo to use in which context..."

As the end of slide 13 currently points back to this repo, which points to the document, which doesn't answer those types of questions. As a project owner, identifying a section (.NET, .NET Foundation, Community) that talks about the category of my project specifically helps guide me to the proper guidance immediately (rather than trying to make a guess if I'm the intended audience).

[BethMassi]

Sure I can make it a bit clearer on 13 as well but these guidelines are not meant to dictate what the community does with their logos. Anyone can use the .NET logo (unmodified) to represent .NET itself, nothing else. Projects based on .NET have their own identities and logos.