The Open Brand Project | We asked for help, and we got it.

The Open Brand Project is a collaborative effort to evolve our corporate logo and brand system. A cross-functional team of in-house designers collaborating with Pentagram, a well-known international design consultancy, are working together to simplify and modernize our logo.

One of the goals of the Open Brand Project, our open initiative to update and simplify our corporate logo and brand system, is to gather as many ideas and as much feedback as possible as we move through the creative process. We want to do this because we know that the best results emerge when you’re able to gather and test a lot of ideas from many people across diverse groups. It’s the open source way,  it’s the Red Hat way.

That’s why we opened our discovery process to the public and asked a series of simple questions in a straightforward survey. We wanted to look beyond the obvious, and beyond our own biases, to understand which features to preserve in our visual identity and which ones we could safely consider dropping or evolving. We wanted to know:

• How people felt about the project overall;

• What they thought were the most important and memorable elements of our current logo;

• And beyond identifying us, what else they thought our logo should communicate to them.

The results are in and we learned a lot.

We received more than 1,200 responses from a mix of technology, marketing, design and branding professionals. There was a lot of curiosity about the project—and some apprehension.

People shared some strong opinions with us and we’re grateful to every respondent for caring enough to share their thoughts.

We heard that 58 percent of survey respondents are curious or excited about the project, but 20 percent are concerned about Red Hat changing its logo. The survey also found that there is a strong link between our logo and our company history, our company culture and the upstream community, that we want to honor. Finally, when it comes to the type of hat that represents Red Hat, it’s “fedoras forever,” with 81 percent of agreeing it represents us well.

See what the respondents had to say.