Where in the world is Shadowman?

Oh, hello there. You might have noticed something new around here. Something’s...different. No, we didn’t get a new haircut, but thank you for the compliment. Our unwavering commitment to open source? Nope, that’s still the same. The Red Hat logo?

Bingo.

You may have noticed we are evolving our logo, and you may be wondering why. “Why would you change our beloved Shadowman?” “Why would you stick with a fedora when you could pick a different hat like a fez?” “Why would you change something made in 1997, that year was the best - flannel shirts, boy bands, Titanic and Tamagotchis!”

All totally fair.

So here are some definitely-not-satirical-at-all-whatsoever reasons* for the change:

• We thought about just letting people vote on a new logo, but then we remembered “Boaty McBoatface.” The Internet is not to be trusted, and we didn’t want to end up in a Hatty McHatface situation.

• We found a note in a conference room that said “Disrupt the millinery industry???” and it kind of snowballed from there. (Psst, that means the hat industry. Don’t worry, we had to Google it too.)

• We feel strongly about supporting tattoo artists, and wanted to send them more business.

• We’ve been told that if you looked at the previous logo just right, it looked like two dinosaurs fighting. While that *sounds* like the coolest logo you could want, we decided it wasn’t quite what we were going for. And we didn’t want to get into a whole Jurassic Park thing.

• We developed a twitch from the number of emails we received in which someone outside (or surprisingly inside) the company misspelled our name. RedHat, redhat, Redhat…

• Everyone learns in kindergarten that you can’t fit a square peg into a round hole, but that didn’t stop us from trying to fit a rectangle logo into a square box (just picture a Twitter profile image).  

• We're not saying the Carmen Sandiego people were suing us about Shadowman. But we're not *not* saying that either...

All joking aside, go check out the full announcement of the Open Brand Project and dive into the nitty-gritty design details. This project has been more than two years in the making, and we did it out in the open—the Red Hat way. Thousands and thousands of survey responses and comments brought us to this point, and our internal creative community did an amazing job of updating our brand identity. We’re thrilled to be debuting it at Red Hat Summit next week in Boston.

Now if you'll excuse us, we have an appointment at the milliner.