Creation of the Fedora Brand Book

Hello! In this blog post I'm going to be talking about my brand book that I made for Fedora and the steps that were taken to get to the final PDF of it and what is also next for this brand book.

This project went on from early July to early October. Here is the ticket for it: https://gitlab.com/fedora/design/team/logos/logo-meta/-/issues/2/

The creation of this brand book started in June, and I first wanted to sketch out the layout of how I wanted the pages to go. I created the layout using an app called Penpot which is similar to Figma and Adobe XD and is also used for website creation, but you can also use it as a place to present artboards of work.

View of how I wanted the pages to be laid out

With this template laid out, I had an idea of what I wanted to do design wise for the pages. I first wanted each page to have a feature page and have a description of what was in this section. Let’s take the ‘Colours’ part of the brand book as an example as it has been the section with the most changes. I first thought of the design when my mentor Máirín was creating secondary wallpapers for Fedora 37 using Blender. She found the method on YouTube, which was a little out of date, but she figured it out how to do it on the most up to date version of Blender. Here is the link to the blogpost she did on it: https://blog.linuxgrrl.com/2022/06/27/abstract-wallpapers-in-blender-using-geometry-nodes/

Seeing them inspired me to make something similar but with the Fedora logo and have them as the backdrops for the title pages of the brand book. With the Fedora logo, I imported an SVG of the logo into Blender and from there, you can turn it into a 3D shape by extruding one of the faces. I then used Máirín’s tutorial to create the shape that you see below and what’s nice about doing it this way is you can change some variables and it changes the whole picture.

Screenshot of Blender Project

Above is the finished design, this colourway is for the ‘Characters’ section of the book as the ‘Colours' version is pink rather than purple. With that, using the camera perspective I exported the image and used the Clipping Mask toclip it to a rectangle as supposed to cropping the image to create the front page. I used the font Montserrat for the heading and paragraph as well. I also used a shadow on the text so that it would be more legible

‘Colours’ header page using the Blender image with another pink overlay

For the layout of the rest of the ‘Colours’, I wanted to create one page for the main Fedora palette, the black and white scale and also have a section for tints all on the one page but I wasn’t sure how to lay it out. So, I created a mood board of inspiration of different examples just to get some ideas.

Different examples of stylised colour palettes

I really liked the gradient version that the middle one had so I went along with that idea and created a gradient for the main Fedora colour palette. I wanted to bring this gradient idea throughout the page, and I also did it with the tints and shades. I also wanted to have the background of the title page to bleed into the other page so to continue it, I put a white rectangle on the page while keeping a section at the top open to show the graphic through it. I also created swatches of the colours using the Fedora logo shape, taking the ‘f’ out of it and rotating it either 180 degrees or 270 depending on what colour you want to point to. I also added all the necessary codes beside each swatch and went into more detail with the major colours.

First iteration of the 'Colours' page

I brought this to the Fedora Design Team and people really liked where it was going! Collectively, we found that everything was squashed on the one page too, and there was a lot of information, so separating the information onto more pages would be the best way to declutter.

I also posted on the Fedora Discussions forum of my progress so far and to get feedback from the public as well. In the meantime, I spread out the design and put it onto two pages and it was starting to look better! I made the main Fedora palette go from horizontal to vertical and it gave me much more room for the information.

Second iteration of the ‘Colours’ section

I got feedback from the Fedora Discussions forum and one thing that popped up was a suggestion from Matthew Miller (Fedora Project Lead) to add the colour-blind palette to the brand book as well, which was a great idea! I brought up my new design and the idea of adding the colour-blind safe palette to the team. They loved the idea of the colour-blind palette as it would be an element that you don’t really see in most brand guidelines. With the new design of the book however, everyone liked the first page with the main Fedora palette gradient and the tints section, but the shades section needed to be changed. The white swatch at the end of it was quite hard to read, which I agreed with. So, what we did instead was I made the tints longer in size and added the black and white shade beside it vertically rather than horizontally and it worked so much better. We also renamed the page ‘Different Variants’.

New version of the 'Different Variants' page

When making the colour-blind palette, the colours had to be in a specific order so that anyone with a particular type of colour-blindness doesn’t get mixed up with them and they can tell the difference between them. I first created this version based on the old formatted colour-blind palette, but the order I first did it in wasn’t the right one, so I changed it to the new format, and it looked much better. I wanted to keep it the same theme as the ‘Different Variants’ section for the updated version and do the swatches beside it to show what it would look like for the different variants of colour-blindness.

Original idea for the colour-blind safe palette

New and final colour-blind safe palette

With the colour-blind section finished, the ‘Colours’ section was complete! In the meantime, all of the other pages were coming together. For all the pages, I had a really solid idea of what I wanted to do from the start, I got some feedback on some pages as well, but it was all minor changes. I also posted an update on to the Fedora Discussions forum and the only feedback that came back from it was that it was hard to read the the text on some of the header pages with resulted in me adding a drop shadow to the text.

Another thing that was changed too was last minute, we added in the white version of the Fedora horizontal logo and had to change the layout of that page too but the changes made were way better than the previous version and looks more polished. We also wanted to create a hierarchy of logos as well having the most used one bigger and then the minor secondary logos smaller.

Previous version of the 'Fedora Logo Basics' page

New version of the 'Fedora Logo Basics' page

Here is the final book!

I really enjoyed this this project and experience of creating a book from scratch and using software such a Blender to create parts of it. Also creating the pages in Inkscape with the new multi-page feature was cool too. What's next for this book however is creating it in a HTML format that we can have hosted on the Fedora Docs and have a place where people can download the necessary assets they need from that page as well.

Thanks for reading!