One aspect of the marketing discipline I don’t like is when marketeers spend considerable amount of time and money investing in logo designs, names, colors and tag lines. I used to work for a company where the VP Marketing claimed the new logo and look was going dramatically propel the company to greatness. Hundreds of thousands of dollars later the company still had mediocre products. There are many examples of unsuccessful corporate re-brandings/re-naming of previously successful software companies; remember Inprise? This is one area of marketing where I tend to place less importance and effort.
Given that personal bias, I come to the Eclipse logo. If I am not mistaken the Eclipse logo has been around for 8-9 years without a lot of change. It has done our community very well. It is well recognized in our industry and I like it. That being said design practices have changed and it might be time to look at ‘modernizing the logo’.
The e4 development team, specifically Susan McCourt, got me thinking the time is right. The e4 development team has been looking at updating some of the Eclipse UI elements but they started to realize this might start to impact the Eclipse logo. Therefore, I agreed to look at updating the logo.
So what does this mean?
I don’t believe we are creating a new logo; we are updating/modernizing it. The results of any update must be readily apparent that this is the logo for the Eclipse community. We aren’t going to invest in a multi-million ad campaign to promote the new logo. If we choose your contribution, appropriate Eclipse swag will come your way; maybe even with the new logo. 
If we are going to make the change for e4 and Helios, then we need to get it done by EclipseCon. Therefore, I want to set a date of March 15 to conclude on a new look or decide we remain with the existing look.
For a point of reference the artwork for the current logo and the different versions is available at eclipse.org/artwork/.
As a reminder, we are not designing an e4 logo, so please don’t incorporate e4 into a new look.
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Start your artistic engines and get designing. Your creation could be with us for the next 8-9 years.
