[OSM-talk] new logo

[SteveC]

On May 16, 2010, at 2:29 PM, Frederik Ramm wrote:
> About your "things have gotten old an crusty" - do you remember how many million times in the API 0.3 or 0.4 days we had some GIS acolyte parachuting in and treating us like idiots because we weren't using PostGIS but MySQL instead? Did we welcome them with open arms and say "Hallelujah, finally someone who brings change?" - No, we said "Implement it and we'll consider." We finally did get rid of MySQL but, as far as I remember, it was not the work of one of these people who, upon finding out that it perhaps was not so easy as they first thought, went on to be the messiah to someone else.

There are major differences, you can't conflate the two.

* This guy actually did something, not just waffle about PostGIS
* Our 'consideration' of his work is 'you arent part of the project' which is not actually a logical argument. Some of your personal opinions on whether it looks like clipart are actually more useful.
* People waffled about PostGIS and ontologies because it's what they were taught to do in GIS, not because they had valid reasons that the tradeoffs were better or something once you took in to account speed or community uptake.

I'll go back to what I said ages ago about law. There are just some domains that you can't expect that your CompSci knowledge will make you ready for. You might read a Copyright law and be clueless about case law in the same way that you're welcome to read a Tufte book, and still not have a clue how to make a site usable. It takes a long, long time to figure this stuff out.

I don't think you can point to a single FLOSS project which did 'design by committee' well? That's why I say we need a czar. That's why I think Shuttleworth is right to ignore people and push on with a design vision, why Ive works at Apple. You can't get a wholistic experience by just copying the shiny buttons and drop shadows off the mac UI. It needs a one-minded driving push to make something like that work.

I think we should probably vote that person in. But sitting around saying "it looks like clipart" gets us utterly nowhere. All that does is piss the guy off, and he clearly knows a lot more design than you or I do, or are likely to know. We should welcome him, say cool - here are the tools, you show us the way, but we have some concerns a,b,c,d...x. And you have to accept that not all of your concerns are going to be fixed, just like with the license process. Because design by committee just doesn't work. But instead, he gets told it's just crappy clip art and he hasn't paid his respects by learning `git` yet to be considered part of the community. Come on. That's totally bonkers. Why in their right mind would anyone good at design want to help us?

>> And you can squabble all you want people, but in the mean time waze
>> is kicking our ass. I wonder how many Frederik's they have at waze
>> writing essays on why design is bad and we don't need new users.
>> Oh, I guess I do want this fight again.
> 
> Then do me a favour and pick what you want to fight about. I see four interwoven messages here:
> 
> 1. Robert's suggestion for a new logo. I do not like it. You didn't even say whether you like it or not. Is this the fight you want, then tell us why you think his logo is better than the one we have.

First, I don't want best to be the enemy of the good or better. The current logo is ok, it can be improved as has been pointed out. Is anyone screaming to get a change pushed through with the current logo? No. Nobody is doing that. Instead you do have this guy. Therefore, a better logo now is more useful than a perfect logo in 2014.

As for why this is better, anyone who has printed t-shirts, conference material or worked in branding will tell you, as I already have that the current logo:

* has too many colours
* doesn't scale
* is too busy
* isn't brandable to a colour scheme

This isn't opinion, it's just basic design facts.

Now, this guy comes along and wants to make things better - cool! Let him have at it I say, because it's not like we need to stick with his logo if we choose forever, is it? It's not like we can't ask him to come back with a bunch of alternative designs, is it?

I would love to avoid starting a sub-committee to look at design and have a bunch of morons attack it with pot shots like what the LWG has had to wade through for 2 years before anything happens. Crowd sourced open projects are fantastic at some things, but UI and design just isn't one of them. I say we just recognise that, and give someone a chance to work on it.

> 2. Your desire to renovate the OSM user interface, or perhaps more: The OSM user experience altogether. My personal take on this is that yes, we could do a lot to improve it, but we haven't (yet) got the right people to do it. They will eventually come and find a way to evolve things, rather than just dumping everything we have and having some guru make it better. - You have tried to pioneer this cause a number of times, but you more often than not did it in a clumsy fashion, stepping on the toes of as many people as possible in the process, and then wondering why you caught flak. I'm sure this will sooner or later be addressed by a team of level-headed people who do their work well and easily manage to convince others that it is good, rather than some ex-cathedra "czar" decision which is not to be questioned.

I catch flak because I'm frank, and the design still sucks, no matter how you spin it. And if you won't be my friend because I tell it how it is, so be it. I just don't have the time to write essay responses to every email and tell everyone how nice and wonderful they are all the time. We should take that as a given and move on. You are all nice and wonderful, but that doesn't mean you have a clue about design.

When Steve Jobs went back to apple one of the first things he did was throw away all the stuff that was in the campus museum. Old macs, Apple ]['s and all that. Because you can't invent the future by looking at the past. Of all the amazing achievements OSM has made, none is as important as the ones to come. If you don't believe that, then there's not a lot of point being here because that would mean we're a declining project, and therefore there are better things to do elsewhere. And I'm telling you, you're looking backward, and you want a process, and a working group so that in about 2 years someone might improve the site design.

It doesn't have to be that way.

Things shouldn't work that everyone gets a veto, which is what almost killed the LWG and is killing this. It should be more that everyone gets a vote. And the veto's that you're throwing against this guy are just short sighted and self-serving.

When I go to conferences, do talks and all that I am OSMs biggest defender. We have the best design in the universe, the servers are infinitely scalable and all that, but here on the list I won't rebroadcast our press releases. We have to be honest and our best self-critic.

> 3. A good user interface, obviously, must be based on knowing what one wants to achieve. I can see a possible fight here as well; my position has always been that growth for growth's sake may harm the project and we are right to take it slow. A slick UI is fine but if we attract people who don't possess the intellectual capacity and patience to be a working member of this community, we could just as well buy data from somewhere. Is this the fight you want, then explain what you think the main aim of our user interface should be and how this would change the project.

It's really simple. Everyone from the heads of geo at very large companies, to GIS managers, to newbies I meet on a daily basis have these concerns, roughly in order:

* Why the hell is the license taking so long? Are you guys morons? Does anything happen in OSMF?
* Why is everything so hard to use? Why does the design/usability suck? Why don't you fix it? You guys must be morons.

What I try to explain of course is that if I could fix it tomorrow I would, but they should think of OSM as a small branch of a political party committee where everyone gets a veto so nothing happens.

The actual details of what the UI should look like, site design and all that are trivial just like moving to the ODbL would have been trivial. That's just not the hard part. There's absolutely no reason why we don't have something (by something I mean design, usability and other things as a bundle) as appealing as mapmaker, waze or mapzen. No reason at all, apart from when anyone stupid enough to suggest an improvement gets jumped on, like this poor guy did.

> 4. Your lust for change pitted against a more cautious approach favoured by others like myself. I don't think that there is actually much to fight over here. You sometimes make it sound as if any change were good, and a proof of life, but I am sure I could come up with a number of fresh ideas that would have you go "hmm, wait a minute". You also like to place anyone who opposes one of *your* ideas in the "resists all change" camp but again, that's more often than not just because of the way you present them. In fact, I personally am very critical of crusty structures, and I have a huge fear that we're heading the the Wikipedia direction where decisions seem to be made by zombies with rulebooks. (Witness this recent thread on talk-de where I brought this up: http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-de/2010-April/067218.html) - Indeed I would very much like to discuss the way in which we make decisions in this project, and how this might be changing in the future, and how we could take precautions to remain open to fresh ideas rathern tahn becoming some crusty democracy hell where any new idea is killed by saying something like "well you can try to convince a majority of mappers if you want...". So I think that you and I have a lot of common ground here (and a lot of common adversaries in the project as well), but installing a "czar" for anything is not something I would consider as the first option. Especially not, and that brings me back to point 1, if he has not shown me anything that makes me think that he understands what OSM is about.

I think you're talking about what OSM *was* about. It's not just 20 people any more. And it's not the libertarian Free code community of yesteryear that you want it to be. It's people from every demographic and we lose literally thousands of potential contributors every day because we turn them off with that ethic, which reflects everything from the site design to the tone of email.

We won the battle for open source people to join. We won the battle, mostly, for GIS users. We're only just starting the battle for people to drop TA/NT data in favour of OSM, because we don't have turn restrictions and addressing done yet. To get there, we have to open up to the next wave of contributors - the ones that people like waze are nabbing.

Have a look at waze's twitter feed. *That* is the kind of community building we need to be doing now. It's not free software nuts in their basement anymore (speaking as a free software nut who lived in a basement). Look at their site design. Look at mapzen. None of it's perfect, but it's generally a lot better than where we are. And I sense you're pushing against it all because of your idea of what a community should look like, and it's just going to be a cul-de-sac if we insist on all this stuff because the people who want to contribute these days are a whole different crowd that people like waze are much better at helping. And it should be _us_ at the forefront not them!

In a company you don't have the accountants running PR. You don't have PR cleaning the toilets and you don't have the toilet cleaners running Sales. So I don't have a clue why in OSM you need to have a design guy go through some masonic ritual community introduction (surely this thread is that introduction) before he can have an opinion about the logo. And frankly, like balancing a lawyers opinion vs. your legal opinion and a designers opinion vs your clipart comments, I'm going to pick the lawyer and the designer. For someone so bright why you can't see your own limitations is baffling to me. 

Yours &c.

Steve