Goals
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This section descirbes the implementation of The CentOS Project Corporate Identity.

Description
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The CentOS Project Corporate Identity is the ``persona'' of the organization known as The CentOS Project.  The CentOS Project Corporate Identity plays a significant role in the way the CentOS Project, as organization, presents itself to both internal and external stakeholders. In general terms, the CentOS Project Corporate Identity expresses the values and ambitions of the CentOS Project organization, its business, and its characteristics.

The CentOS Project Corporate Identity provides visibility, recognizability, reputation, structure and identification to The CentOS Project organization by means of Corporate Design, Corporate Communication, and Corporate Behaviour.

Corporate Design
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The CentOS Project Corporate Design is applied to every single visual manifestations The CentOS Project as organization wants to express its existence. Examples of the most relevant visual manifestations inside The CentOS Project are The CentOS Distribution, The CentOS Web and The CentOS Stationery.

The CentOS Project Corporate Design is organized in the following work-lines:

Brands

     The CentOS Brand provides the one unique name or trademark that connects the producer with their products. In this case, the producer is The CentOS Project and the products are The CentOS Project visual manifestations.

     See Directories trunk Identity Brands, for more information.

Palettes

     The CentOS Palettes provide the Corporate Color information used along The CentOS Project visual manifestations.

     See Directories trunk Identity Palettes, for more information.

Fonts

     The CentOS Fonts provide the Corporate Typography information used along The CentOS Project visual manifestations.

     See Directories trunk Identity Fonts, for more information.

Themes

     The CentOS Themes provide the Corporate Structure and the Corporate Visual Style used along The CentOS Project visual manifestations.

     See Directories trunk Identity Themes, for more information.

Manual

     This section organizes the CentOS Artwork Repository Manual (i.e., the documentation manual you're reading right now).  If you are interested on improving The CentOS Artwork Repository Manual, in this place you'll find the Texinfo documentation structure you need to work with.

     See Directories trunk Manual, for more information.

Locales

     This section organizes production of translation messages for Identity, Documentation and Scripts. This place is perfect to consolidate The CentOS Translation SIG. If you love translating, you'll find lot of messages waiting for you to translate here.

     See Directories trunk Locales, for more information.

Corporate Communication
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The CentOS Project Corporate Communication is based on Community Communication.  In that sake, the following media are available:

  * The CentOS Chat (#centos, #centos-social, #centos-devel on irc.freenode.net)

  * The CentOS Mailing Lists (http://lists.centos.org/).

  * The CentOS Forums (http://forums.centos.org/).

Corporate Behaviour
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The CentOS Project Corporate Behaviour is based on Community Behaviour.

Corporate Structure
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The CentOS Project Corporate Structure is based on a Monolithic Corporate Visual Identity Structure. In this structure, one unique name and one unique visual style is used in all visual manifestation of The CentOS Project.

In a monolithic corporate visual identity structure, internal and external stakeholders use to feel a strong sensation of uniformity, orientation, and identification with the organization. No matter if you are visiting web sites, using the distribution, or acting on social events, the one unique name and one unique visual style connects them all to say: Hey! we are all part of The CentOS Project.

Other corporate structures for The CentOS Project have been considered as well. Such is the case of producing one different visual style for each major releasae of CentOS Distribution. This structure isn't inconvenient at all, but some visual contradictions could be introduced if it isn't applied correctly and we need to be aware of it. To apply it correctly, we need to know what The CentOS Project and which are the visual manifestations it is made of.

The CentOS Project, as organization, is mainly made of (but not limited to) three visual manifestions: Distribution, Web and Stationery. Inside the Distribution visual manifestations, The CentOS Project maintains near to four different major releases of CentOS Distribution, parallely in time.  Inside Web and Stationery visual manifestations content is visually produced to fit non-release-specifc content but treat it as a visual manifestation properly. For example, consider that there is no a complete web site for each major release of CentOS distribution, but one web site to cover the information related to all release-specific visual manifestations like CentOS distribution.

In order to produce the correct corporate structure for The CentOS Project we need to concider all the visual manifestations The CentOS Project is made of, not just one of them.  If one different visual style is used for each major release of The CentOS Distribution, which one of those different visual styles would be used to cover the remaining visual manifestations The CentOS Project is made of (e.g., web sites and stationery)?

Probably you are thinking, that's right, but The CentOS Brand connects them all already, why would we need to join them up into the same visual style too, isn't it more work to do, and harder to maintain?

Harder to maintain, more work to do, probably. Specially when you consider that The CentOS Project has proven stability and consistency through time and that, certainly, didn't come through swinging magical wangs or something but hardly working out to automate tasks and providing maintainance through time. Said that, we consider that The CentOS Project Visual Structure should be consequent with such stability and consistency tradition. It is true that The CentOS Brand does connect all the visual manifestations it is present on, but that connection would be stronger if one unique visual style backups it. In fact, whatever thing you do to strength the visual connection among The CentOS Project visual manifestations would be very good in favor of The CentOS Project recognition.

Obviously, having just one visual style in all visual manifestations for eternity would be a very boring thing and would give the idea of a visually dead project. So, there is no problem on creating a brand new visual style for each new major release of The CentOS Distribution, in order to refresh The CentOS Distribution visual style; the problem is in not propagating the brand new visual style created for the new release of CentOS Distribution to all other visual manifestations The CentOS Project is made of, in a way The CentOS Project could be recognized no matter what visual manifestation be in front of us. Such lack of uniformity is what introduces the visual contradition we are precisely trying to solve by mean of themes production in the CentOS Artwork Repository.

Usage
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The trunk/Identity/ directory structure is organized in renderable and non-renderable directories. Generally, renderable directories are stored under trunk/Identity/Images and trunk/Identity/Themes/Motifs directories. These directories contain the image files used to implemente The CentOS Project Corporate Identity.

Rendition
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In order to produce content inside rendereble directories, you can use the following command:

centos-art render trunk/Identity/Path/To/Dir

     Warning If the centos-art command-line is not found in your workstation, it is probably because you haven't prepared your workstation for using The CentOS Artwork Repository yet. See Directories trunk Scripts Functions Prepare, for more information.

This command takes one design template (a.k.a., design model) from the template directory and creates an instance of it in order to apply translation messages, if any. Later, using the translated design template instance, the command renders the final content based on whether the design template instance is a SVG file or XHTML.  If the design template instace is a SVG file, the final content produced is a PNG image. On the other hand, if the design template instance is a XHTML file, the final content produced is a XHTML file. The rendition flow described so far is known as the centos-art.sh script base-rendition flow.

Besides the base-rendition flow, the centos-art provides post-rendition and last-rendition flows.  The post-rendition flow is applied to files produced as result of base-rendition flow under the same directory structure. For example, you can use post-rendition action to convert the PNG base output into different outputs formats (e.g., JPG, PDF, etc.) before passing to process the next file in the same directory structure.  The last-rendition flow, on the other hand, is applied to all files produced as result of both base-rendition and post-rendition flows in the same directory structure, just before passing to process a different directory structure.  For example, the Preview.png image from Ksplash component is made of three images. In order to build the Preview.png image through centos-art.sh we need to wait for all the three images the Preview.png image is made of to be rendered in order to combine them all together into just one image (i.e., the Preview.png image).  This is something we can't do using post-rendition flow.

Inside trunk/Identity directory structure, you can find that base-rendition, post-rendition and last-rendition flows can be combined to build directory-specific rendition.  The directory-specific rendition exists to automatically process specific renderable directories in very specific ways. Using directory-specific rendition speeds up production of different components like Syslinux, Grub, Gdm, Kdm and Ksplash that require intermediate formats or even several independent files, in order to reach the final content construction.  Directory-specific rendition is a way to programmatically describe how specific art works are built in and organized inside The CentOS Artwork Repository.  Such descriptions have been added to centos-art.sh command-line to let you produce them all with just one single command, as fast as your machine can be able to handle it.

See Directories trunk Scripts Functions Render, for more information about the render functionality of centos-art.sh script.

Documentation
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Localization
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See also
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See http://en.wikipedia.org/Corporate_identity (and related links), for general information on Corporate Identity.

Specially useful has been, and still is, the book Corporate Identity by Wally Olins (1989). This book provides many conceptual ideas we've used as base to build The CentOS Artwork Repository.