Preface ------- Every single corporation, organization, society or community has its own unique identity, even though their members don't take an intentional control over it. Having an strong identity plays a significant role in the way the organization presents itself to both internal and external stakeholders. It expresses the values and ambitions of the organization, its business, and its characteristics. It provides visibility, recognizability, reputation, structure and identification to the organization by means of graphic design, communication, and behavior. This kind of control is expensive and not all organizations are able to maintain it. Nevertheless, organizations can assume an acceptable degree of compromise and, based on pragmatic facts, work on a consistent idea that can be progressively improved through time. To work on a consistent idea of identity, the organization defines its mission and makes it public in a place everyone can read. Then, the organization identifies each single manifestation where it shows its existence on in order take control over their presentations. The presentation of one organization is controlled by graphical components like names, symbols, colors, logotypes and, social components like rituals, behaviours and communication. All these components are interrelated and affect the organization identity. To effectively and efficiently control each single manifestation the organization is made of, the organization creates and publishes its ``Identity Manual.'' In such a manual, the organization clearly identifies the visual manifestations it wants to take control of and how exactly to do that. It is a tool. It is a reference manual that describes the organization itself. Trough the years the CentOS community has shown a growing interest on helping to develop The CentOS Project. Some people seem to be very clear about what the project's needs are and how to maintain it being a highly stable project, but others however don't get what The CentOS Project is (even it is explained time after time) and sometimes decide to put their efforts in the wrong direction making everything to be a waste of time and source of distraction from what is really needed. In order for the community to concentrate efforts in the right direction effectively and efficiently, the community needs a visible reference describing what these right directions are. _The CentOS Project Identity Manual_ identifies and describes the key manifestations of The CentOS Project identity. This manual answers the question ``What can I do for The CentOS Project?'' identifying different work lines that relate one another and everyone can join in. It describes a working environment where there are graphic designers producing images, documenters producing documentation manuals (whose use images produced by graphic designers), programmers producing automation scripts (needed to standardize production tasks), translators localizing source files created by graphic designers, documenters and programmers and packagers collecting information from all work lines for building RPM packages. _The CentOS Project Identity Manual_ organizes content in two main parts. The first part of the book (<>) describes conceptual ideas about The CentOS Project corporate identity (e.g., mission, names, symbols, colors and visual structure). It sets the background information you need in order to understand the second part of the book (<>) which describes the implementation of The CentOS Project corporate identity (e.g., how to produce images, translations, documents and packages). Copyright ~~~~~~~~~ Copyright (C) 2009-2013 The CentOS Artwork SIG. Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in <>. Feedback ~~~~~~~~ _The CentOS Project Identity Manual_ is a community effort and it needs of your collaboration in order to get improved. If you find problems in this book, please send your corrections, comments and suggestions to CentOS artwork mailing list (mailto:centos-artwork@centos.org[centos-artwork@centos.org]). This is the central vain of discussion about The CentOS Project identity inside the CentOS community. When you send corrections to CentOS artwork mailing list, please be sure to define what the problem exactly is, define where it is, and the possible solution. This increases the chances that someone could take it and implement it. Poorly described problems might be skipped by people responsible of implementing the solutions. You might also find useful to propose your initiatives as a community effort so they can be validated and supported by the community itself. // vim: set syntax=asciidoc: