FedoraCopied

Fedora showed its new logo to its community council in March 2021, after a process that started in 2018. OMG! Ubuntu reported that the project's lead designer, Máirín Duffy, walked through the design, its journey and its rollout, and reassured fans that the new mark and logotype stay firmly in keeping with the familiar infinity logo.

The aim was to fix design deficiencies in the old glyph. It could not be reproduced in a single colour, and its wordmark had problems such as an a that looked more like an o. Czech community site MojeFedora noted that Duffy was also the author of the previous logo, and said the inability to show it in one colour was its biggest weakness. The Fedora Council had approved the new logo five months earlier, but the launch waited for legal steps such as trademark registration.

OMG! Ubuntu called the result a refreshing improvement, less fussy than the logo it replaces and a better representation of the nimble, flexible project. It was not a wholesale revamp, the site added, and it avoided the list of rebranding disasters.

MojeFedora noted that Duffy presented the logo in a video with Fedora Project Leader Matthew Miller, and that the site itself would have to change because its own logo was based on Fedora's. OMG! Ubuntu added that tentative designs had been produced in 2019, and that Ubuntu's designers were grappling with a brand hierarchy rejig of their own. The ripple through community sites is a reminder that an open source logo is a shared asset, which is one more reason the cautious approach was right.

The logo debuted with Fedora Linux 34. The release announcement on Fedora Magazine said the first thing users might notice was the beautiful new logo, developed by the Fedora Design Team with input from the wider community, solving many of the old logo's technical problems while keeping its Fedoraness. The rollout was planned over 12 to 18 months, starting with major sites, promotional material and social accounts, and the team floated a bug tracker for sightings of the old logo.

This is open source design at its best: slow, public, technically motivated and humble. Nobody needed a new Fedora identity, but everyone benefits from a logo that works in one colour on a T-shirt, a sticker or a terminal splash. The best rebrands fix real problems, and this one fixes exactly the ones it set out to.