I don’t understand the need for redesigning the logo for Leap and Tumbleweed
It feels like OpenSUSE is struggling with brand identity when it doesn’t need to
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We haven’t paid attention to that … and strangely, we’ve not seen any of those, or simply brush it off (not sure where they’re displayed).
Been running TW and now primarily Leap for years.
Believe it or not … auto makers and countless other product manufacturers, in many other industries, do it.
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It’s not uncommon for companies and organizations to do logo redesigns periodically to keep things “fresh” and “modern”.
Consistency is something that can make things feel “old” and “outdated”.
As it happens, there’s some discussion going on about what’s involved in doing an actual rebrand over in Project Discussions - not focused on the branding elements themselves (I cannot emphasize that enough - the discussion about “what” is a “later” discussion; the discussion about “how” is necessary to understand what it takes to successfully execute a rebranding), but more on the process and what’s needed if the project were to want (or need) to go through an actual rebranding exercise.
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“struggle”? Confused about the intent of that.
A majority of world-wide organizations rebrand - “business os usual”, as they say.
I understand that the OpenSUSE rebrand is unavoidable, and that’s a whole another discussion, which I won’t delve into much.
First, you’re correct, logos get refreshed all the time. It’s a necessary evil when the logo starts looking dated in comparison to competition. However, to maintain brand recognition, the changes are usually rare and incremental when possible. I do not see a reason why these logos in particular needed a refresh, especially at a time like this.
For the record, it took Ubuntu 12 years for its logo to get a refresh. For Fedora, it took 15 years. Arch Linux is still going strong 16 years later. Debian is still going strong 25 years later. I would provide corporate examples, but I think they would be inappropriate for a community project like this.
I just don’t think that a distro logo rebrand at a time like this is beneficial for [Insert new project name here]'s brand recognition. I also don’t think the new logos are more recognizable than the old ones.
I really want to be proven wrong, though.
The only benefit these new logos serve, in my opinion, is that they are more cohesive with the new “abstract”, “unfilled” look that the project is now aiming for. Sacrificing consistency for consistency, so to speak.
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P.S. Thank you for the link to a good category, I will be reading these threads in my spare time.
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Arguably, that’s a pretty significant benefit 
openSUSE as a project itself started in 2005 - so it’s nearly a 20-year-old project in its own right. The other distro projects have been around for a while, sure, and all have fairly decent followings.
Time will tell if this change is a good one - as it always does when things change. Meanwhile, I personally think it’s going to be more beneficial to look at governance and project direction (it’s telling that everyone thinks “Linux distribution” when they think of openSUSE, when the reality is that there’s so much more to openSUSE besides Leap and Tumbleweed - the two distributions that most people think of when they hear the name.
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I’m speaking as a long time openSUSE user having contributed little, so I have little skin in the game. I can just give an outside perspective.
“there’s so much more to openSUSE besides Leap and Tumbleweed”
I believe that is absolutely true, but nothing rebranding can change. Key innovations in Linux based OSes have been driven by openSUSE (zypper, OBS, openQA, btrfs to name only a few), but this has never been capitalized upon.
To me, the name openSUSE emanates confidence in that the project is backed by professional engineering. I only recently got aware of the discussion through youtube-videos of the openSUSE conference and was shocked to hear how some openSUSE members would easily fall in line with arguments of SUSE managers. I would expect re-branding to further weaken the project. Instead, sub-projects would have to emphasize strong links with the project including all presences (homepage, github, software branding).
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I was looking for a thread on the TW logo redesign for a few days just to say the new logo does not make sense to me. As far as I understand the old logo meant something, it meant infinity, since TW is a rolling release. But what is this new logo trying to be? Maybe it is trying too hard to be something and so it is not able to convey anything at all.
I thought it looked similar to an hour glass. If that was the artist’s intention, then it still holds the same basic meaning of the previous logo.
Ok I can see how it looks like an hour glass, rather convoluted I would say, still, I don’t understand how it (hour glass) means what the old logo meant
Just speculating here, but it looks like a tumbling hour glass. Since the infinity symbol and an hour glass both represent time in this case, I think it is close enough to the same meaning.
Although, I think the logo should be an actual tumbleweed.
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I appreciate consistency. Am I old and outdated?
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Branding is often an “enticement” for new users, not something used to keep existing users.
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Nice comment. I’d like to just say I prefer what we have now. But one persons opinion is no another. So yes, I love the current logo for both Leap and TW
Personally, I don’t see a need to change those just because of the name branding change. And if we it ends up being the case that the logos get changed, please - please not as seen above by OP
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